Sidebar: Bob Propst Is Not the Father of the Cubicle

In the history of furniture, no design concept has suffered such an ignominious perversion. What started as an expression of freedom and individuality has today become a badge of barren organizations and mindless management: The Cubicle.

Bob Propst knows the whole story. Because Bob Propst is the man who invented what became the cubicle. "The last thing on the planet we'd ever have called it was the cubicle," he says. "What we wanted to control was relative enclosure. Over-cubiclized organizations were characterized by terrible communications, miserable relationships. And open space, with wild, bizarre intrusions on people, was also not satisfactory. We became interested in how you control privacy -- privacy part of the time and access to each other part of the time."

Propst, now 74 and running his own consulting and design firm in Redmond, Washington, was working with Herman Miller when he came up with the world's first office system in the 1960s; he dubbed it the "Action Office."

Today, however, the cubicle has become an object of derision, and Propst himself is openly contemptuous of the way hives of cubicles have taken over the office landscape. "We've always been alarmed at the tendency to containerize people, to put them away never to be seen again," he says. "Why would anyone choose to live or work in other than a stimulating, revitalizing environment? But organizations get what they deserve."

Propst, who is currently studying how successful people manage the flood of information that comes at them each day, says some workplaces have been able to achieve a distinct aesthetic -- particularly the romantic associations attached to cowboys, "with their horse and saddle," and construction workers, with their hard hats on job sites.

"The knowledge worker hasn't achieved that kind of aesthetic," says Propst. "If anything, he looks alienated from any aesthetic at all, surrounded by an artificial environment, dictated by some remote design effect. He appears to be the victim of the environment."

Sidebar: How to Talk Furniture

The language of furniture is no longer the lexicon of surface finishes or fabric textures - it is the words of work. Here's a glossary to help you understand the thinking behind the furniture.

Cognitive ergonomics. The relationship between your physical environment and your ability to think. Cognitive ergonomics assumes that your physical setting affects your ability to think, to be creative, to make connections.

Information persistence. The opportunity to keep important information on display for as long as it is useful. Information persistence assumes that constant visual reminders of what you're working on operate as a reinforcer of creativity. Information is embedded where you work; "cleaning it up" means losing the information. (Related term: embedded knowledge)

Work-relaxed mode. Operating at less than full intensity -- reviewing a memo, organizing notes, returning phone calls, reading e-mail. As work blends into what used to be downtime, knowledge workers need furniture that fits an intermediate style -- working with feet up or sitting on the bed in a hotel room.

Layered performance. Furniture that can do more than one thing; a table with wheels that can be used as an individual work space then pushed together with other wheeled tables to form a conference space.

Churn. The number of times people change work stations during the year; in a company with 400% churn, people change desks four times a year. The goal: furniture for continuous churn.

Context-switching. Moving from doing one thing to doing another. Context-switching may be physical; it is always psychological. Among the challenges: creating the right kind of "luggage" to allow people to move their stuff from one context to another; providing workspaces that permit easy switching from individual to team work.