Universitatea de Științe Agronomice și Medicină Veterinară BucureștiFacultatea de Management, Inginerie În Agricultura și Dezvoltare RuralăSpecializarea: Inginerie Economică în Agricultură

Coordonator: Frumușelu Mihai

Student: Dusmanu FlorinGrupa: 8201

It was the 1960s and a growing class of North Americans were being dubbed as “knowledge workers.” Probst, head of research for furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, thought their desks stifled their thinking. Why should people line up like clerks in a 19th-century counting house? Why clean their desks each day? For that matter, why sit down?

In the past 40 years, the basic tension in office design – between collaboration and concentration – has not been resolved. This challenge has never been more important than today, when the labour force is filled with perma-temps, technology allows workers to be fully mobile, and employers are pushing to reduce their real estate footprints.

At the same time, the Uber office includes “work caves,” upholstered niches where employees can work on solitary projects without closing a door on their colleagues. The goal is to balance space for individual tasks with room for collaboration. “We know there are issues with the open office,” Cherry continues. “Introverts can’t focus the way they need to.”

Steve Jobs, when he was chief executive of Pixar, pushed for its open headquarters to include an atrium space where all employees would have to, at some point, bump into

each other. Fifteen years later, that model has been widely adopted.

That tension is an old one. In his recent book Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, cultural critic Nikil Saval traces two centuries’ worth of office culture. His account makes clear that employers have always seen the office as a machine to create hierarchy and control staff.

Open office spaces are separated from glassed-in, soundproof meeting areas; for in-between zones, screens of aluminum louvers provide permeable walls of visual and aural privacy. “Those louvers help to break up sight lines and sound,” adds designer Jonathan Sabine. “You can create a hierarchy of privacy in these spaces – when they need privacy, it has to be absolute, and then there are desks. But there’s an in-between.”

Bibliografie: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/