“Wow, I’m so excited that we’re going to move to an open-plan office workspace,” said no one in the history of work.
I’ve never worked in a fully “open concept” environment, but I’ve worked in private offices and I’ve worked in tiny, door-less cubicles. 
The closest I came to an open office environment was the computer room I worked in nearly 40 years ago.
My job was developing (admittedly bogus and useless) forecasting models and reports for Fortune 500 companies so that they could forecast their fortunes. This was in the day before personal computers. So we didn’t have computers in offices. And we mostly didn’t work off of screens either. We worked on paper, on “DecWriters” like the one pictured here – the one with the stiff sitting at it, fingers poised over the keyboard, as rigor mortis sets in. DecWriters were attached to a mainframe computers and we typed stuff in and waited for the mainframe to spit something back.
Anyway, when we had to work on our models, as opposed to sitting in our offices bullshitting with each other, bullshitting customers, or listening to sales people bullshitting us, we worked in the Terminal Room, we sat in a bullpen with a dozen or so DecWriters, a couple of clattering old printers, and a few green screen terminal boxes that we fought for because they were so cool. (Ahem.)
Working in the Terminal Room wasn’t all that bad, as we got to socialize while we waited for the deathly slow mainframe to compile our models, etc. And, when we had a question about our pretty complex modeling language – XSIM – we could just shout out our question and someone always had the answer. (It was easier to shout out a question than it was to look through the XSIM documentation, two tan-leatherette volumes the size of a couple of Gutenberg Bibles.)
But the Terminal Room was okay because we could always retreat to a private or semi-private office.
As I said, no one but no one wants to work in an open office.
Nope, it’s something dreamed up by accounting, in cahoots with HR who shill for the company by trying to drum up enthusiasm for willingly giving up private space where you can hear yourself think and make a mammogram appointment or deal with your insurance company after a fender-bender to “collaborate” with colleagues. “Collaborate” mostly being a euphemism for being distracted by having to listen to your colleagues think out loud, make mammogram appointments and deal with their insurance company after a fender-bender.
But open plan is apparently here to stay. And necessity being the mother of invention, folks are stepping in to make it “better.”
Panasonic’s Future Life Factory is developing wearable blinkers, designed to limit your sense of sound and sight, and help you focus on what's directly in front of you.
The prototype device, called Wear Space, is designed to keep people distraction-free when working in busy spaces or open-plan offices by blocking them off from their immediate surroundings...
Panasonic hopes that by using the partition to cut the user's horizontal field of vision by about 60 per cent, it will encourage them to concentrate on the work in front of them.
"As open offices and digital nomads are on the rise, workers are finding it ever more important to have personal space where they can focus," said the company. "Wear Space instantly creates this kind of personal space – it's as simple as putting on an article of clothing." (Source: Dezeen)
Seriously, the only article of clothing that I’d want for an open plan office is a Harry Potter invisibility cloak.
Invisibility cloak aside, all I can think of when I hear that open office denizens will be wearing something that looks like a horse blinker is “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”
This partition is fixed around the wearer's head by a pair of noise-cancelling headphones fitted to the inside of the curved body. These are used to block out ambient sounds, and feature three levels of noise cancellation depending on the environment.
The design studio behind WearSpace is doing a crowdfunding campaign to get support for this product.
The crowd-funding site is mostly in Japanese, but when I looked they were only looking for $133K (15 million yen), of which they’ve raised $75K (8.4 million yen).
Even if I could read kanji and understand Japanese, I would most assuredly not be investing in WearSpace.
Hard to believe if, but once this hits the market, the open plan office will get even worse. And I didn’t think that was even remotely possible.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
A tip of the WearSpace blinkers to my sister Trish who spotted this item.
1 comment:
Agree wholeheartedly. Although I will say that 'open offices' COULD potentially work, or at least be less awful, if narcissism were less of a factor in today's culture. The fact that people think it is perfectly acceptable to eat their microwaved fish lunch at their open desk, to have their cell phones on full volume so they ring loudly every ten minutes with personal phone calls, and numerous other assaults on common decency, these are the factors that make open offices absolutely unworkable. Yet these behaviors could all be avoided.
Post a Comment