The cubicle and its regret

The office cubicle was not born from a wish to cram employees together—but the opposite. In 1968 designer Robert Propst created the “Action Office” for Herman Miller: a modular system of movable partitions and adjustable work surfaces, grounded in research on fatigue and concentration. The idea was to offer privacy, movement, and autonomy, against the row-style open plans of the era.

The market did the opposite. Companies kept only the partitions, multiplying them to squeeze as many desks as possible onto minimal floor space. The Action Office became the uniform cubicle, symbol of white-collar alienation—same height, same gray fabric, same isolation without real privacy. Propst himself would later denounce the “monolithic madness” his invention had enabled.

The episode sums up a law of design: a device meant to emancipate can, under economic pressure, flip into a tool for density and control. The cubicle is not hell by nature—it is a good idea warped by the logic of square meters.