My friend Neil Usher writes about the swinging metronome of fashion in office space use.
I commented:
An old geezer writes: At around the turn of the century, I managed to wangle some office space of my own by a) being an early hire in a new organisation and b) arguing hard that I could not possibly write a strategy and design information systems in a space where I couldn't shut the babble of the rabble out if I wanted to. I then dug in and resisted having at first one room-mate and then two but the forces of co-habitation were overwhelming. I resigned a few months later and never went back.The other thing that "kids today" don't get is the extent to which office design also had to accommodate large amounts of organised paper storage - not just a few sheets of A4 but filing cabinets with all sorts of inserts and shelving for lever-arch files galore - let alone all the comb-bound reports. You needed your information to hand and that meant at least on the same floor (and guarded by eagle-eyed clerks) and more than likely in "your" office.
I'm so glad that I don't have to work where someone else wants me to work all the time these days. And I'm glad that we get to use paper as one technology among many rather than the only way to do things. It's enormously flexible and powerful, but shrinking the filing system down and moving it to a space where anyone can work with it, anywhere in the world is one of the great steps forward I've seen in my working life time. If you didn't experience it, I doubt that you can appreciate how far we've come.
BTW - that above is the office building I'm talking about. Turns out my bailiwick on the third floor is soon to become someone's badly-decorated bedroom.
