Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 61, by Joe Podolsky:
Date: 9/5/96 9:45 AM
Subject: Smashing Furniture
As I look around my cubicle, I begin to appreciate how
conservative I really am. Oh sure, I have a nice new NT
computer linked to LANs and WANs and Webs and Notes and all that
stuff. But my desk, filing cabinets, and bookcases are still
the sturdy and practical metal and Formica of generations past.
I'm not looking forward to being remodeled next year to conform
to the new Building 20 "upgrade."
I guess I don't think too much about office furniture, but
obviously somebody does. In fact, Charles Fishman wrote an
article about the subject in the August:September 1996 issue of
_Fast Company_. I was particularly intrigued by a section of
the article called "The Grand Unified Theory of Work." I don't
think that the content merited that "grand" a title, but it was
interesting.
The article introduces us to Bill Miller, who is the head of
research and development for Steelcase, the furniture company in
Grand Rapids, Michigan. Miller's calls his theory the
"Ying-Yang Principles." He says that there are "...two
irresistible forces...rapidly reshaping work - and all of
life..." These two principles are knowledge aggregation and
infrastructure disaggregation.
"Knowledge aggregation is just what it sounds like accumulating
knowledge. It's libraries, teams, war rooms, the computer chip.
It's why people want a place to hang their flip charts...
leave stuff up on the wall so that you see it all the time, and
you'll absorb its meaning more completely and more rapidly.
"Infrastructure disaggregation is the distribution of the tools
to accomplish things. It's ... the car supplanting the
railroad. It's network computers supplanting mainframes; it's
laptops instead of desktops."
Miller thinks that the Internet illustrates the overlapping of
both principles. But the key to the Internet, from his
viewpoint, is a corollary to his knowledge aggregation
principle. "It turns out," says Miller," that you need other
people to know things...Two people working together learn faster
than individuals alone..." (Miller doesn't talk, however, about
what the limit of this is; i.e., at what point do the problems
of communications among people begin to inhibit the group's
learning. Is it three people? Ten? The number of
communication lines = n/2(n-1) where n is the number of
communication nodes, so the number gets big fast.)
Getting back to his core expertise, however, Miller says that
offices are not designed for group work, even for pairs, much
less for bigger groups. He says that offices have to shift
"from a place to work as an individual to a place to work as a
group."
In this office environment, Miller says that "computers will be
ubiquitous but transparent; they will be designed for
simultaneous group work rather than for individual work."
Computer output screens will cover walls and display as many
channels as needed. And the displays can be called up wherever
we are, at home, at our office, or at a client's site.
Miller introduces us to a whole new set of "furniture talk"; for
example:
- "Cognitive ergonomics", assuming that our physical settings
affect our thinking processes.
"Information persistence," where the physical settings enable us
to keep information on display as long as appropriate to
reinforce learning. "Cleaning up," says Miller, "means losing
information." ("Hey Mom, I'm not going to clean my room because
it will keep me from learning!" Maybe Miller never had any
teenagers.)
"Context switching," where people can easily shift they way they
are physically located to suit the way they want to work. The
most common example of this is the ability to shift from
individual to group work just by moving chairs and moveable
tables. But it also implies the more technically complicated
issues often associated with the "mobile knowledge worker."
The article also introduces us to Bob Propst. Propst worked at
Herman Miller in the 1960's where he designed the open office
technology that we've now love to hate as "cubicles." Propst
hates them, too. His original concept was to balance privacy
and access, to find an effective compromise between the
isolation of individual offices and the constant intrusion of
the open bullpen. "We've always been alarmed," Propst says, "at
the tendency to containerize people, to put them away (in
cubicles) never to be seen again."
Propst, now 74 and retired from Herman Miller, now runs a
consulting practice in Redmond, Washington. He is trying to
develop workplace that "achieve a distinct aesthetic." He wants
knowledge workers to be in settings that evoke the same romantic
images that we get thinking about cowboys in their saddles or
construction workers in their hard-hats walking narrow I-beams
50-stories up. Propst admits that "the knowledge worker hasn't
achieved that kind of aesthetic."
Clearly, all this has tons of impact on our systems and process.
We are building systems that aggregate knowledge and
disaggregate tools. We will build both the infrastructures and
applications that will enable these environments. HP will build
the hardware that will work in the furniture ... and give us
freedom from it. And, as is fitting, we will work in the
environments we build, becoming our own next bench.
What environments have you seen that you liked ... or hated?
What systems do you know of that well enable knowledge
aggregation and/or effectively disaggregate infrastructure? How
about systems that did a good job of enabling ... or disabling
productivity? Am I really going to love that new modular
cubicle, or should I find a way of hanging on to my metal and
Formica antiques?
Regards
Joe