The Utopian Origins of Cubicles
thenewatlantis.com
thenewatlantis.com
As far as the IRS is concerned, improving your office space is not a business expense, so you can't deduct it; the most you can do is depreciate the cost over time and take the depreciation as an expense. If you build walls to create separate offices, you have to depreciate the cost over forty years. If you buy cubicles and install them, you can depreciate the cost over only seven years. If you lease the cubicles, the monthly lease is considered a business expense, and you can deduct all of it right away.
i disagree completely. double-entry and calculators fundamentally changed society.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/
I recommend watching them all. Great stuff.
Wow, two-hundred and fifty square feet on average!
I can feel my ego shriveling as I twist in my chair, taking in a panoramic view of my allocated 7 x 7.
(pin the quote on the movie)
Heh. Cells. Cubes. Same diff.
Oh wait! It's not?!?!?
Screwed.
The interesting question is - what will come after cubicles?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen
He wanted to recreate the downtown of a typical European city, but it ended up as "lots of stores packed together", and he eventually gave up and moved back to Europe, disappointed with the whole thing.
Its a cubicle working going beserk, caught on tape, destroying part of the office.
You get no privacy (noise), yet you're isolated from others.
I always likened them to jail cells where you still have to pay for your own lunch.
It's hard to tease out a central thesis from this article, but I think I would focus on the claim that offices are part of a bureaucratic system that is slowed by paperwork, and that pushing people together encourages them to wander over and chat about work rather than constantly draft memos. I think that view is out of date, in the age of email and IM. Cubicles divide people enough that they don't feel like they're side-by-side on a team, yet distract technical workers and break their concentration.
You'd think so.
I'm just remembering the projects where we got the most done. Which were also the most fun (go figure).
One was a 20 x 15 room with 4 desks and a white board.
Another was one big table with 4 of us facing each other. (When I had to be alone, I went out to my RV in the parking lot.)
Another was a conference room with a long table and a bunch of laptops.
We used to call these "war rooms".
(Why is it when we really have to get something done, we throw each other together in a "war room". The rest of the time, we sit in soulless offices and cubicles?)
The New Atlantis is quietly a very conservative publication. Just FYI.