Cubicle
Encyclopedia
Тhe cubicle, cubicle desk, office cubicle or cubicle workstation is a partially enclosed workspace, separated from neighboring workspaces by partitions that are usually 5–6 ft (1.5–1.8 ) tall. Its purpose is to isolate office workers from the sights and noises of an open workspace, the theory being that this allows workers more privacy, and personalization, and helps them to concentrate without distractions. Horizontal work surfaces are usually suspended from the vertical partitions of cubicles, as is shelving, overhead storage, and other amenities. The office cubicle was created by designer Robert Propst
for Herman Miller, and released in 1967 under the name "Action Office
II".
Although cubicles are often seen as being symbolic of the human condition of working in a modern office setting due to their uniformity and blandness, they actually afford the employee a greater degree of privacy and personalization than was found in the previous work environment, which consisted of desks lined up in rows within an open room.
cubiculum, for bed chamber. It was used in English as early as the 15th century. It eventually came to be used for small chambers of all sorts, and for small rooms or study spaces with partitions which do not reach to the ceiling.
Like the older carrel desk
, a cubicle seeks to give a degree of privacy to the user while taking up minimal space in a large or medium sized room. Like the modular desk of the mid-20th century, it is composed of modular elements that can be arranged in various ways with standard hardware or custom fasteners, depending on the design. Installation is generally performed by professionals, although some cubicles allow configuration changes to be performed by users without specific training. Cubicles are configurable, allowing a variety of elements such as work surfaces, overhead bins, drawers, and such to be installed depending on the user's needs.
, and the supervision of George Nelson
. Its mission was to solve problems related to the use of furniture, but not the furniture itself. The corporation's first major project was an evaluation of the "office" as it had evolved during the 20th Century, and in particular, how it functioned in the 1960s. Propst's studies included learning about the ways people work in an office, how information travels, and how the office layout affects their performance. Propst consulted with mathematicians, behavioral psychologists, and anthropologists. Propst concluded from his studies that during the 20th Century the office environment had changed substantially, particularly in relation to the amount of information being processed. The amount of information an employee had to analyze, organize, and maintain had increased dramatically. Despite this, the basic layout of the corporate office had remained largely unchanged, with employees sitting behind rows of traditional desks in a large open room, devoid of privacy. Propst's studies suggested that an open environment actually reduced communication between employees, and impeded personal initiative. On this, Propst commented "One of the regrettable conditions of present day offices is the tendency to provide a formula kind of sameness for everyone." In addition, the employee's bodies were suffering from long hours of sitting in one position. Propst concluded that office workers require both privacy and interaction, depending on which of their many duties they were performing.
Propst and the Research Corporation developed a plan, which George Nelson
's office executed in the form of the Action Office
I (AO-1), and introduced it in the Herman Miller lineup in 1964. AO-1 featured desks and workspaces of varying height which allowed the worker a freedom of movement, and to assume the work position best suited for the task. AO-1 was ideally suited to small professional offices in which managers and employees often interacted using the same furnishings, but wasn't suitable for large corporation offices. In addition, it was expensive and difficult to assemble. Despite its shortcomings, Nelson won the Alcoa Award for the design, neglecting to mention Propst's contribution.
AO-2 was based around the mobile wall unit that defined space. The unit also supported multiple workstation furnishings, which benefited from the vertically-oriented work space. The components were interchangeable, standardized, and simple to assemble and install. More importantly, they were highly flexible, allowing the company to modify the work environment as needs changed.
The AO-2 lineup was an unprecedented success, and was quickly copied by other manufacturers. In 1978, "Action Office II" was renamed simply "Action Office", and by 2005 had attained sales totaling $5 Billion.
of New York
, which contracted with George Nelson and Herman Miller in 1963 to design an innovative office space that could maximize efficiency in a small area. The result was based on Nelson's CPS (Comprehensive Panel System), and featured "pods" of four cubicles arranged in a swastika
pattern, each with an "L" shaped desk and overhead storage. Surviving photos of the Federal Reserve Bank offices reveal a design that would not appear much different from a cubicle of today.
In 1964 this design was re-used for the Woman's Medical Clinic of Lafayette, Indiana
. Nelson also used the design in his own New York design offices.
forms, past or present. It can transform all of the walls surrounding the white-collar worker
into productive work surfaces, or nooks for personal expression. Because the walls are within reach, and because many of them offer holes and hooks for hanging small shelves, bulletin boards or other accessories, elements which were once placed only on the horizontal surface of the desktop can be moved to the vertical surfaces. While cubicle desk makers usually employ proprietary standards for their fasteners and accessory hooks, this has not stopped the makers of small-scale desktop accessories from producing and marketing myriad pen holders, magazine racks, and such which fit popular brands of cubicle partitions.
Note that it is also possible to create a cubicle-filled office environment without the use of cubicle desks by combining traditional free-standing desk forms like the pedestal desk
with special types of free-standing partitions. This kind of environment is often part of a general office landscaping effort which was popularized in the 1950s and the 1960s in Germany
and the United Kingdom
.
filled with cubicles is sometimes called a cube farm
. Although humorous, the phrase usually has negative connotations. Cube farms are often found in high-tech companies, but they also appear in the insurance industry and other service-related fields. Many cube farms were built during the dotcom boom
. A popular slang used frequently in offices, mainly in the greater New York City area, is "Stop my cube", which refers to the action of "swinging by" or holding a meeting within a cube.
Some interesting R&D has been going on in the field of cubicles at the turn of this millennium. One of the most sarcastic critics of the cubicle has been Scott Adams, speaking through his comic strip, Dilbert
. In 2001 he teamed up with the design company IDEO
to create "Dilbert's Ultimate Cubicle". It had some whimsical aspects but there were also some very sound design ideas such as an original modular approach and attention to usually neglected ergonomic details like the change in light orientation as the day advances. Similarly, Douglas Coupland
has coined the phrase "veal
-fattening pen", a deprecation of cubicles in his novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
.
Between 2000 and 2002, IBM
partnered with the office furniture manufacturer Steelcase
, and researched the software, hardware, and ergonomic aspects of the cubicle of the future (or the office of the future
) under the name "BlueSpace
". They produced several prototypes of this hi-tech multi screened workspace and even exhibited one at Walt Disney World. Bluespace offered movable multiple screens inside and outside, a projection system, advanced individual lighting heating and ventilation controls, and a host of software applications to orchestrate everything.
In 1994 designer Douglas Ball planned and built several iterations of the Clipper or CS-1, a "capsule" desk looking like the streamlined front fuselage of a fighter plane. Meant as a computer workstation, it had louvers and an integrated ventilation system, as well as a host of built-in features typical of the ergonomic desk. An office space filled with these instead of traditional squarish cubicles would look like a hangar filled with small flight simulators. It was selected for the permanent design collection of the Design Museum in the United Kingdom.
Despite becoming Herman Miller's most successful project, George Nelson disowned himself from any connection with the "Action Office II" line. In 1970 he sent a letter to Robert Blaich, who had beome Herman Miller's Vice-President for Corporate Design and Communication, in which he described the system's "dehumanizing effect as a working environment." He summed up his feeling by saying:
Scornful as he may have been, Nelson was right that there turned out to be a "larger market" for AO II. By 2005 total sales had reached $5 billion.
Robert Propst
Robert Propst was the inventor of the Action Office that evolved into the cubicle office furniture system.Robert Propst was from Colorado and worked for Herman Miller in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was hired in 1958 by Herman Miller Inc...
for Herman Miller, and released in 1967 under the name "Action Office
Action Office
The Action Office is a series of furniture designed by Robert Propst, and sold by Herman Miller. First introduced in 1964 as the Action Office I product line, then superseded by the Action Office II series, it is an influential design in the history of “contract furniture”...
II".
Although cubicles are often seen as being symbolic of the human condition of working in a modern office setting due to their uniformity and blandness, they actually afford the employee a greater degree of privacy and personalization than was found in the previous work environment, which consisted of desks lined up in rows within an open room.
History
The term cubicle comes from the LatinLatin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
cubiculum, for bed chamber. It was used in English as early as the 15th century. It eventually came to be used for small chambers of all sorts, and for small rooms or study spaces with partitions which do not reach to the ceiling.
Like the older carrel desk
Carrel desk
A carrel desk is a small desk featuring high sides meant to visually isolate its user from any surroundings either partially or totally. They were a predecessor to the more recent cubicle desk.- Description :...
, a cubicle seeks to give a degree of privacy to the user while taking up minimal space in a large or medium sized room. Like the modular desk of the mid-20th century, it is composed of modular elements that can be arranged in various ways with standard hardware or custom fasteners, depending on the design. Installation is generally performed by professionals, although some cubicles allow configuration changes to be performed by users without specific training. Cubicles are configurable, allowing a variety of elements such as work surfaces, overhead bins, drawers, and such to be installed depending on the user's needs.
Action Office I
In 1960 Herman Miller created the Herman Miller Research Corporation under the direction of Robert PropstRobert Propst
Robert Propst was the inventor of the Action Office that evolved into the cubicle office furniture system.Robert Propst was from Colorado and worked for Herman Miller in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was hired in 1958 by Herman Miller Inc...
, and the supervision of George Nelson
George Nelson
George Nelson may refer to:*George Nelson , Lord Mayor of London*George Nelson *George Nelson , American*George Nelson, 1st Baron Nelson of Stafford , British engineer...
. Its mission was to solve problems related to the use of furniture, but not the furniture itself. The corporation's first major project was an evaluation of the "office" as it had evolved during the 20th Century, and in particular, how it functioned in the 1960s. Propst's studies included learning about the ways people work in an office, how information travels, and how the office layout affects their performance. Propst consulted with mathematicians, behavioral psychologists, and anthropologists. Propst concluded from his studies that during the 20th Century the office environment had changed substantially, particularly in relation to the amount of information being processed. The amount of information an employee had to analyze, organize, and maintain had increased dramatically. Despite this, the basic layout of the corporate office had remained largely unchanged, with employees sitting behind rows of traditional desks in a large open room, devoid of privacy. Propst's studies suggested that an open environment actually reduced communication between employees, and impeded personal initiative. On this, Propst commented "One of the regrettable conditions of present day offices is the tendency to provide a formula kind of sameness for everyone." In addition, the employee's bodies were suffering from long hours of sitting in one position. Propst concluded that office workers require both privacy and interaction, depending on which of their many duties they were performing.
Propst and the Research Corporation developed a plan, which George Nelson
George Nelson
George Nelson may refer to:*George Nelson , Lord Mayor of London*George Nelson *George Nelson , American*George Nelson, 1st Baron Nelson of Stafford , British engineer...
's office executed in the form of the Action Office
Action Office
The Action Office is a series of furniture designed by Robert Propst, and sold by Herman Miller. First introduced in 1964 as the Action Office I product line, then superseded by the Action Office II series, it is an influential design in the history of “contract furniture”...
I (AO-1), and introduced it in the Herman Miller lineup in 1964. AO-1 featured desks and workspaces of varying height which allowed the worker a freedom of movement, and to assume the work position best suited for the task. AO-1 was ideally suited to small professional offices in which managers and employees often interacted using the same furnishings, but wasn't suitable for large corporation offices. In addition, it was expensive and difficult to assemble. Despite its shortcomings, Nelson won the Alcoa Award for the design, neglecting to mention Propst's contribution.
Action Office II
Following the poor sales of the AO-1, Propst and Nelson went back to the drawing board. For several years, Propst and Nelson fought over a disagreement on the work environment best suited to the employee of a corporate office, and Nelson was eventually taken off the project. With Nelson gone, Propst was free to indulge in his concept of an office capable of constant change to suit the changing needs of the employee, without having to purchase new furnishings, and allowed the employee a degree of privacy, and the ability to personalize their work environment without impacting the environment of the workers around them. Propst recognized that people are more productive within a territorial enclave that they can personalize, but also require vistas outside their space. Propst's concept was the "back-up", a two- or three-sided vertical division that that defined territory and afforded privacy without hindering the ability to view or participate in surrounding activities.AO-2 was based around the mobile wall unit that defined space. The unit also supported multiple workstation furnishings, which benefited from the vertically-oriented work space. The components were interchangeable, standardized, and simple to assemble and install. More importantly, they were highly flexible, allowing the company to modify the work environment as needs changed.
The AO-2 lineup was an unprecedented success, and was quickly copied by other manufacturers. In 1978, "Action Office II" was renamed simply "Action Office", and by 2005 had attained sales totaling $5 Billion.
First appearances
The first offices to incorporate the "Action Office" design were in the Federal Reserve BankFederal Reserve Bank
The twelve Federal Reserve Banks form a major part of the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States. The twelve federal reserve banks together divide the nation into twelve Federal Reserve Districts, the twelve banking districts created by the Federal Reserve Act of...
of New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, which contracted with George Nelson and Herman Miller in 1963 to design an innovative office space that could maximize efficiency in a small area. The result was based on Nelson's CPS (Comprehensive Panel System), and featured "pods" of four cubicles arranged in a swastika
Swastika
The swastika is an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles, in either right-facing form in counter clock motion or its mirrored left-facing form in clock motion. Earliest archaeological evidence of swastika-shaped ornaments dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization of Ancient...
pattern, each with an "L" shaped desk and overhead storage. Surviving photos of the Federal Reserve Bank offices reveal a design that would not appear much different from a cubicle of today.
In 1964 this design was re-used for the Woman's Medical Clinic of Lafayette, Indiana
Lafayette, Indiana
Lafayette is a city in and the county seat of Tippecanoe County, Indiana, United States, northwest of Indianapolis. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 67,140. West Lafayette, on the other side of the Wabash River, is home to Purdue University, which has a large impact on...
. Nelson also used the design in his own New York design offices.
Versatile cubicle walls
On the positive side the cubicle desk offers options for customization by its users which is not comparable to other deskDesk
A desk is a furniture form and a class of table often used in a work or office setting for reading or writing on or using a computer. Desks often have one or more drawers to store office supplies and papers. Unlike a regular table, usually only one side of a desk is suitable to sit on . Not all...
forms, past or present. It can transform all of the walls surrounding the white-collar worker
White-collar worker
The term white-collar worker refers to a person who performs professional, managerial, or administrative work, in contrast with a blue-collar worker, whose job requires manual labor...
into productive work surfaces, or nooks for personal expression. Because the walls are within reach, and because many of them offer holes and hooks for hanging small shelves, bulletin boards or other accessories, elements which were once placed only on the horizontal surface of the desktop can be moved to the vertical surfaces. While cubicle desk makers usually employ proprietary standards for their fasteners and accessory hooks, this has not stopped the makers of small-scale desktop accessories from producing and marketing myriad pen holders, magazine racks, and such which fit popular brands of cubicle partitions.
Note that it is also possible to create a cubicle-filled office environment without the use of cubicle desks by combining traditional free-standing desk forms like the pedestal desk
Pedestal desk
A pedestal desk is usually a large free-standing desk made of a simple rectangular working surface resting on two pedestals or small cabinets of stacked drawers of one or two sizes, with plinths around the bases. Often, there is also a central large drawer above the legs and knees of the user...
with special types of free-standing partitions. This kind of environment is often part of a general office landscaping effort which was popularized in the 1950s and the 1960s in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
.
Explorations of the cubicle form
An officeOffice
An office is generally a room or other area in which people work, but may also denote a position within an organization with specific duties attached to it ; the latter is in fact an earlier usage, office as place originally referring to the location of one's duty. When used as an adjective, the...
filled with cubicles is sometimes called a cube farm
Sea of cubicles
Sea of cubicles is a derisive vernacular term for featureless, modern open office designs which consist of seemingly endless rows of identical office cubicles.- History :The exact origin of the term has been lost...
. Although humorous, the phrase usually has negative connotations. Cube farms are often found in high-tech companies, but they also appear in the insurance industry and other service-related fields. Many cube farms were built during the dotcom boom
Dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...
. A popular slang used frequently in offices, mainly in the greater New York City area, is "Stop my cube", which refers to the action of "swinging by" or holding a meeting within a cube.
Some interesting R&D has been going on in the field of cubicles at the turn of this millennium. One of the most sarcastic critics of the cubicle has been Scott Adams, speaking through his comic strip, Dilbert
Dilbert
Dilbert is an American comic strip written and drawn by Scott Adams. First published on April 16, 1989, Dilbert is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office featuring the engineer Dilbert as the title character...
. In 2001 he teamed up with the design company IDEO
IDEO
IDEO is an international design and innovation consultancy founded in Palo Alto, California, United States with other locations in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston, London, Munich, Shanghai, and Singapore, as well as Mumbai, Seoul, and Tokyo. The company helps design products, services,...
to create "Dilbert's Ultimate Cubicle". It had some whimsical aspects but there were also some very sound design ideas such as an original modular approach and attention to usually neglected ergonomic details like the change in light orientation as the day advances. Similarly, Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as McJob and...
has coined the phrase "veal
Veal
Veal is the meat of young cattle , as opposed to meat from older cattle. Though veal can be produced from a calf of either sex and any breed, most veal comes from male calves of dairy cattle breeds...
-fattening pen", a deprecation of cubicles in his novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, published by St. Martin's Press in 1991, is the first novel by Douglas Coupland. The novel popularized the term Generation X, which refers to Americans and Canadians who reached adulthood in the late 1980s...
.
Between 2000 and 2002, IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
partnered with the office furniture manufacturer Steelcase
Steelcase
Steelcase is an international office furniture company founded in 1912 in Grand Rapids, Michigan — as The Metal Office Furniture Company. The company at the time specialized in file cabinets and safes. Today, the company sells products related to interior architecture, furniture and technology...
, and researched the software, hardware, and ergonomic aspects of the cubicle of the future (or the office of the future
Office of the future
The office of the future is a concept dating from the 1940s. It is also known as the "paperless office". After sixty years of unfulfilled prophecies the phrase "paperless office" has been discredited somewhat...
) under the name "BlueSpace
Bluespace
BlueSpace is an enterprise software company serving the defense and intelligence communities, primarily in the US. Today it is based in Austin, Texas, but it was founded in the UK in 2001. BlueSpace is focused on the Multi-Level Security arena, creating mashup applications that can span multiple...
". They produced several prototypes of this hi-tech multi screened workspace and even exhibited one at Walt Disney World. Bluespace offered movable multiple screens inside and outside, a projection system, advanced individual lighting heating and ventilation controls, and a host of software applications to orchestrate everything.
In 1994 designer Douglas Ball planned and built several iterations of the Clipper or CS-1, a "capsule" desk looking like the streamlined front fuselage of a fighter plane. Meant as a computer workstation, it had louvers and an integrated ventilation system, as well as a host of built-in features typical of the ergonomic desk. An office space filled with these instead of traditional squarish cubicles would look like a hangar filled with small flight simulators. It was selected for the permanent design collection of the Design Museum in the United Kingdom.
Impact on society
It is unlikely that any other office furnishings have had as great a social impact as the introduction of the office cubicle in the 1960s, though the outcome of the cubicle's arrival is still open to debate, in both its pros and cons. Author Thomas Hine has gone so far as to speculate that the cubicle made it possible for women to move into middle management positions in the late 1960s because the introduction of cubicles gave their male counterparts a new office environment in which to place women managers without having to allow their entry into the private "bull pens" that had been the exclusive domain of men.Despite becoming Herman Miller's most successful project, George Nelson disowned himself from any connection with the "Action Office II" line. In 1970 he sent a letter to Robert Blaich, who had beome Herman Miller's Vice-President for Corporate Design and Communication, in which he described the system's "dehumanizing effect as a working environment." He summed up his feeling by saying:
- One does not have to be an especially perceptive critic to realize that AO II is definitely not a system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general. But it is admirable for planners looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies, for "employees" (as against individuals), for "personnel," corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority. A large market.
Scornful as he may have been, Nelson was right that there turned out to be a "larger market" for AO II. By 2005 total sales had reached $5 billion.
Cube farms in popular culture
- DilbertDilbertDilbert is an American comic strip written and drawn by Scott Adams. First published on April 16, 1989, Dilbert is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office featuring the engineer Dilbert as the title character...
, the quintessential cube farm comic strip. Additionally, the term chronic cubicle syndrome was invented in the television series. This is a term used jokingly to tell about the effects of working in a cubicle for too long. In one point in the comic strip, there is even a cube farmer. - Office SpaceOffice SpaceOffice Space is a 1999 American comedy film satirizing work life in a typical 1990s software company. Written and directed by Mike Judge, it focuses on a handful of individuals fed up with their jobs portrayed by Ron Livingston, Jennifer Aniston, Gary Cole, David Herman, Ajay Naidu, and Diedrich...
is a filmFilmA film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
about programmerProgrammerA programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to...
s distressed by their jobs in a cubicle farm at a softwareComputer softwareComputer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....
firm. - TronTron-Film:*Tron , a franchise that began in 1982 with the Walt Disney Pictures film Tron** Tron , a 1982 science fiction film by Disney, starring Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, Cindy Morgan, Dan Shor and David Warner...
features a massive cube farm. - The OfficeThe Office (UK TV series)The Office is a British sitcom television series that was first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Two on 9 July 2001. Created, written, and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the programme is about the day-to-day lives of office employees in the Slough branch of the fictitious...
television series from the UK featuring employees of Wernham-Hogg working in a mixture of desks and cubicles. - Thomas Anderson (Neo)Neo (The Matrix)Thomas A. Anderson is a fictional character and the main protagonist in The Matrix franchise, as well as having a cameo in The Animatrix short film, Kid's Story. He was portrayed by Keanu Reeves in The Matrix Trilogy and The Animatrix. Andrew Bowen provided Neo's voice in The Matrix: Path of Neo...
, the main character from The MatrixThe MatrixThe Matrix is a 1999 science fiction-action film written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, and Hugo Weaving...
, works inside a cubicle that emphasizes his isolation from the world. A scene plays out in his office, amidst the cubicles. - The Drew Carey ShowThe Drew Carey ShowThe Drew Carey Show is an American sitcom that aired on ABC from 1995 to 2004. The show was set in Cleveland, Ohio, and revolved around the retail office and home life of "everyman" Drew Carey, a fictionalized version of the actor....
— Much of the show was set in the titular character's cubicle in the fictional Winfred-Lauder department store. The cubicle was a source of much of the show's humour; it was remarked that it was, in fact, invented by the store's founder after discovering it "only took three walls to make a man feel trapped". - "Cubicles", a song by American rock band My Chemical RomanceMy Chemical RomanceMy Chemical Romance is an American alternative rock band from New Jersey, formed in 2001. The band consists of lead vocalist Gerard Way, guitarists Ray Toro and Frank Iero, and bassist Mikey Way and have a diverse sound incorporating elements of punk, emo, glam metal, and progressive rock...
- "Cubicle", a song by French band RinôçérôseRinôçérôseRinôçérôse is a French band founded by Jean-Philippe Freu and Patrice Carrié that mixes rock music and electronic dance music. The duo of musicians also work as psychologists, calling themselves, "Psychologists by day, musicians by night". They compose music in English, French, and German...
- The film Wanted's main character, Wesley Gibson, works in a cube farm until he becomes part of The Fraternity.
External links
- CNN/Fortune - Cubicles: The great mistake
- Building a Better Cubicle Article on cubicle trends
- Cubitopia Article on the utopian ideal of the cubicle
- Cubicles: A Documentary Site for short documentary on cubicles.
- Cubicle management and design Managing your workspace within company guidelines.