"And it went click" - Dawn of the Working Dead

The patient was delighted to be asked. He took out the notebook and began to explain he had been making a careful time and motion study of the hospital staff and had observed everything, all the inefficient movements, the squandered energy, and the wasted time. It could all be done so much better. The patient's name was Robert Proops, and Robert Proops was a genius. His colleagues certainly thought so. In one hour, he would reinvent the world. His mind went

off like fireworks. Proops had been a sculptor, painter, and professor of art. He'd invented everything from playground equipment to an artificial heart valve to a machine readable livestock tag. His formal training was as a chemical engineer, not that he let his formal training constrain him. During the Second World War, he'd managed Beachhead Logistics in the South Pacific. But in the nineteen sixties Robert Pruf would invent an object that has shaped the everyday lives of tens of millions,

perhaps hundreds of millions of people. But when I say that his invention shaped our lives, what sort of shape exactly? I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. In nineteen fifty eight, the Herman Miller Company, a maker of office furniture, hired Robert proopst His mission was to deploy his brand of spirited, cross disciplinary creativity to help Herman Miller diversify away from the potentially stayed world of filing cabinets, desks,

and swivel chairs. Proops wasn't a designer, but maybe that was a good thing. He would dream big, think deep thoughts, and take Herman Miller in new directions. Proops started by setting up a research studio in the college town of ann Arbor, Michigan. That decision would have been easily explicable had Herman Miller itself not been located one hundred and fifty miles away in Zealand. It would be a bold

step even in today's era of remote work. In the pre internet world of nineteen fifty eight, his decision demonstrated that Proops valued the cerebral yet convivial atmosphere of a college town and that he wanted an extraordinary amount of independence from head office. It also showed that what he wanted, he got. Herman Miller gave him a free hand. There were only three rules. The first rule, don't design anything purely ornamental, make useful things. The second rule, don't make

anything for the military. And the third rule, don't make office furniture. The first two rules he respected. Robert Proops wasn't a man whose creativity could easily be constrained or directed. Herman Miller was trying to break out of its traditional business of office furniture, and Proops seemed like the perfect man to help with that. But asking a free spirit like Proops not to think about office furniture simply encouraged

him to think about office furniture even harder. After all, thinking about office furniture meant thinking about everything, mind, body, and soul. He carefully observed office dwellers at work. He read the latest ideas from management thinkers, explaining that the economy of the future would revolve around a new kind of worker, the knowledge worker, and he hungrily consumed ideas

from psychology, sociology, and anthropology. All this grand talk about knowledge workers rather obscures the question of what exactly a knowledge worker is. There's a black and white photograph of just such a worker, using furniture designed by Robert Prout's research team. Next to him is a computer display teen sixty eight style. It's on a pivot and casters for easy tilting and swiveling and movement. The knowledge worker himself is wearing the standard office clothes of the day, white shirt,

dark tie, smart dark suit pants. He looks intensely relaxed, calmly focused on the work in his lap, leaning back in an elegant Eames chair with his feet up on a little circular conference table. And that work in his lap a large computer interface supported by modifications to the chair, an all in one module with a keyboard, a computer mouse,

and other controllers. And if nineteen sixty eight seems a bit early to have a laptop, keyboard and a computer mouse, well, the knowledge worker's name was Douglas Engelbart as a Silicon Valley pioneer. He invented the computer mouse. When Robert Proops was reading about knowledge workers, he was thinking of people like Douglas Engelbart, the top people, the most brilliant people, people who couldn't be put in boxes, people like himself.

Robert Proops didn't like to be called a designer, or even a searcher, with its connotations of looking back to dig up old ideas. He preferred to be called a searcher. So what if he could make the perfect office for searchers like Douglas Engelbart and like Proops himself. At the time, the typical American office space had a large open area with neat rows of typists and secretaries and clerks in the middle, surrounded by offices with closable doors. Today's office

is a wasteland, wrote Proops in nineteen sixty. Its SAPs vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort. But there was a hopeful development over in Germany. The bureau land shaft or office landscape, designed by two brothers at the consulting firm Quickborner Bureau

land Shaft threw everything into the air. There would be one huge room with groups of desks artfully arranged to appear haphazard, sinuous routes between them like paths through a rock garden, and everything dotted with soft acou stick screens and pot plants. It was flexible. If the needs of the office changed, he just moved the desks around. Thick carpet absorbed noise. There were break rooms rather than a trundling tea trolley. There were no offices and no obvious hierarchy.

Proops loved this new trend, but he could do so much better than those inefficient flat table desks and the endless sitting no good for your back, and Proops was a man who well understood the agonies of a bad back. Proops wanted to design a system which accommodated movement, a system with verticality stand up, sit down, spin round. In nineteen sixty four, Herman Miller revealed Robert Proops's brainchild to

the world. It was called simply Action Office. According to the design historian Jennifer Kaufman Buehler, Action Office would upend the American office furniture industry through the nineteen seventies. But as we'll see, it did much more than that. Action office was built around the idea of the workstation. One sits at a desk like a secretary, but one sits in a workstation like a fighter pilot sits in a cockpit surrounded by a variety of achingly cool freestanding furniture

units located in the arena center, explained proops. You are free to turn and use a suitable work surface, console or conference expression. Yes, indeed, everything you need is within vision as you spin your stylish rotating chair. Your files are color coded, sitting on a shelf at eye level, perfectly adjustable, and mounted on a soundproof divider above your equally adjustable desk, maybe a low coffee table where a couple of coffee cups sit empty after an impromptu brainstorm

with a colleague espresso cups. Of course, there's a pin board full of your creative ideas. Do you need to discreetly lock them away? No problem, The board folds down to provide a secure cover over a side desk. Of course, you also have a large, angled architect's desk with a swivel stool you can stand at it or sit, moving around dynamically from idea to idea, from chair to stool to standing at your pinboard. You are active, You are creative.

You look fabulous. You are the knowledge worker, the beating heart, and the pulsing brain of Action Office. The concept was by Proofs, the stylish design by his colleague George Nelson. Nelson, director of design at Herman Miller, was no passenger on this adventure. Nelson was one of the taste makers of the twentieth century, working with iconic figures such as Charles

and ray Eames or Isamunugucci. And Nelson's designs for the Action Office units were so cool that Stanley Kubrick used the Action Office on a space station in two thousand and one a Space Odyssey. This was the kind of furniture people would have in the future in space right. Some executives bought it for their own homes. The reviews were delirious.

rather differently. And it was their bosses who chose the office design, which raised the question why would they pay for the action office? Action office cost five hundred dollars for the simplest component. Relative to the wages of the day, that would be more like ten thousand dollars today. The first rule for anyone seeking to sell equipment for workers, surely is to remember who buys equipment for workers. It's

not the workers, it's the managers. And while the workers might dream of climbing into the cockpit of their own

productivity plane, the managers are focused on efficiency. This is an old story going back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the founder of scientific management, watching manual workers with a stopwattion, calculating the most efficient movements and the optimal equipment, even the ideal size of shovel to give to a laborer digging a ditch, which might differ from the ideal shovel for a laborer shoveling coal, and since this was scientifically

determined what the laborer himself thought of, it didn't much matter. Robert proopst didn't think in terms of shovels, but he certainly understood the appeal of time and motion studies, as the nurses caring for his bad back could have attested. And while Proops dreamed of creating the perfect working environment for the Douglas Engelbarts of the world, perhaps the dividing line between an inventor like Douglas Engelbart and a worker digging a ditch isn't as clear as he might have imagined.

Once the bosses started thinking about efficiency, Sure, Douglas Engelbart is a knowledge worker, but are the secretaries. Maybe, but corporate bosses weren't lavishing thousands of dollars on designer furniture for the secretaries, which explains why, despite being a critical and cultural success, the Action Office was a commercial failure. So what were bosses buying in a nutshell? Better and

better stop botches? The bosses have always been particularly keen to use technology to monitor what workers get up to so they can squeeze more work out of them. That's been true from the punch clock of one hundred years ago that records you arriving at or leaving work, right

up to the complex technologies of today. While Robert Proopst and George Nelson were making space age furniture at Interplanetary, says, the bosses were more interested in squeezing workers, which is how we got to now with workers constantly being watched. Amazon tracks our every move, explains Wendy Taylor. She works as a packer at an Amazon warehouse in Missouri, and was one of a group of workers who filed a complaint against Amazon in May of twenty twenty four. They

know every move you make when you're working. When you're not working, they surveil you with their cameras. Managers survail you with their laptops because they can pull up your profile and a bar changes a certain color. When you're not active, every move you make is being tracked. Another worker who was worried about surveillance was Carol Kramer. Unlike Wendy Taylor, Kramer had a desk based job. She had a camera pointed at her throughout the working day, taking snapshots.

Both of her face and her computer screen to verify that she was being productive. Her pay was regularly docked because the system decided she wasn't working, even though she might have been mentoring a colleague, or making notes with Pensiland paper that the camera didn't track, or, for that matter, just taking a bathroom break. That might all sound familiar to the likes of warehouse packers like Wendy Taylor, but Carol Kramer wasn't a low paid administrator or call center worker.

She was a corporate vice president, managing a team of twelve people and being paid two hundred dollars an hour. Workplaced surveillance wasn't just for the factory floor or the warehouse. It was coming for managers like Carol Kramer. In nineteen sixty eight, four years after Action Office was such a cultural triumph and such a commercial failure, Robert Proops tried again. He published a manifesto titled The Office, a Facility based on Change. More importantly, he offered a less costly, more

compact version of the Action Office concept. George Nelson and his iconic designs had been jettisoned, but Action Office two still organized space vertically as well as horizontally, still offered multiple work surfaces, still used dividers to absorb sound and organize and display materials in use, and still sought to offer privacy without isolation. The system was modular, flexible, and

easily adapted. The dividers snapped together at a variety of angles, but Proops favored three dividers per worker with a hunter dred and twenty degree angle, which creates a half hexagon space packed with ideas. Action Office two was a lot cheaper than its predecessor, and it looked a lot cheaper too, But still it was practical and a bit funky, especially those hexagons. The new system got good reviews. Sylvia Porter, a columnist at the New York Post, called it a revolution,

adding I find the concept entirely appealing. I particularly like the idea of sit down or stand up workstations. She loved the way Proops described workers as human performers, and yet looking at publicity photographs of the system, you can't help but notice one difference. The Action Office one system tended to be photographed as a collection of unique components designed to equip a single knowledge worker, a genius like Douglas Engelbart right and that seemed to be how proops

envisaged them. An early sketch biproops shows all the cool components, the swivel chairs, the roll top desk, the shelving, the coffee table, the angle drawing board. They are quite clearly located in a spacious private office space. But the Action Office two system wasn't designed to be installed in an office, but to replace one, or more likely a whole row of offices. Photographs showed Action Office two units in multiples, not one half hexagon workstation, but three clipped together for

three workers to sit close together. The honeycomb was starting to take shape from the corporate garden that was bureau land shaft get busy worker bees. Action Office too took off in a way that its pricey predecessor never had. It was inexpensive, practical, compact, and it got a little

boost from the government too. The US tax code changed, giving a nice tax break to companies which bought rapidly depreciating equipment such as furniture rather than long lasting office fixtures such as doors and internal walls, which meant if you could buy furniture instead of building offices, Uncle Sam would reward you Action Office too, had looked cheap before, now it looked really cheap in more ways than one. Every office furniture company in North America scrambled to copy

the idea. Soon they were Steelcase, Soonar Gnol, They were all making modular office furniture systems. One of the Sonar designers went to admire the installation of their modular system at a large government office in Canada. Excited to see the dynamic new system in action, he came back looking as pale as a beige partition. It was awful, one

of the worst installations I'd ever seen, he said. Sonar had installed dividing panels that were seventy inches tall, not tall enough to be a proper wall, but high enough to block all line of sight. They'd seemed to make sense on the drawing board, but en mass they were oppressive. While the original bureau land shaft concept felt like strolling through a shrubbery, this new installation was more like a sterile labyrinth, with workers trapped behind a maze of Hessian

wrapped walls. At the time, the designer didn't have the right words to describe the horror of it all. It was only years later that the culture started to provide them. Looking back, the designer summed it up, I'd failed to visualize what it would look like when there were so many of them. It was Dilbertville. The designer of Action Office one, George Nelson wouldn't have been surprised at how

grim these new modular furniture systems looked. Furious at being discarded from the Action Office project, he wrote to his boss at the Herman Miller Company, Tearing into Action Office III, complaining that the whole idea treated people as less than human.

This dehumanizing characteristic is not an accident, but the inevitable expression of a concept which views people as links in a corporate system for handling paper, or as input output organisms whose efficiency has been a matter of nervous concern for the past half century. People do indeed function in such roles, but this is not what people are, merely a description of what they doing certain hours. Nelson's point

was powerful. If you treat people like components in a machine, it doesn't matter how excited you are about their dynamism or movement or flexibility, or how they can mesh together to produce remarkable results. Ultimately, you have forgotten that they are human and don't be surprised if that lapse has consequences action office too, continued Nelson is definitely not a system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general,

and then comes the prophetic next line. 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 ouch. But George Nelson had put his finger on

the problem. While Robert Proops wanted workers to be able to adapt, to move around, and above all, to be in control of their own knowledge work benches, George Nelson realized that it didn't matter what Robert Proops wanted, and it didn't matter what the workers wanted. Managers were in charge, and managers had their own agenda. Cautionary tales will be back after the break. The conflict between Nelson and Proops shouldn't have come as a surprise. Proops could be intellectually

stubborn and intolerant of people who disagreed. He believed his way was the right way, said a colleague, and he was usually right. But there was more than that stubbornness to the falling out. Nelson had highlighted a contradiction in Proopst's thinking. Proops spoke of human performers, but what if there was a tension between job performance and simply being human?

Proops embodied that tension. One day, he's setting up a research studio one hundred and fifty miles away from head office, insisting on his freedom to innovate and to skip boring corporate meetings. Another day, he's a hospital patient, making minute observations on all the ways that the nurses around him could move more efficiently. Time and studies are fun if

you're the one holding the stopwatch and the clipboard. Action Office imagined a class of people like Proops himself, or like Douglas Engelbart, whose performance depended on the fullest exercise of their human freedom and human creativity. But Action Office too didn't appeal to the boss class because it encouraged human freedom and human creativity, but because it was efficient and the inevitable next step they would try to make

it more efficient. Still. The great architect Frank Duffy described that awful realization. To the writer and office historian Nikil Saval, there was a moment when the orthogonal came in. Someone figured out that you didn't need the one hundred and twenty degree and it went click. That was a bad day. It took only five seconds for Action Office to turn into a box. Robert Proops had shaped our lives, and

that shape was a cube. Proops had been ahead of his time in emphasizing flexibility, worker autonomy, and movement away from the sedentary desk. Indeed, he hated the very word desk. For Proops, knowledge workers were like artisans at their workbenches, tools organized close at hand rather than hidden away, everything in motion, vibrant rather than austere. And yet somehow he

had invented the hated cubicle. Less a dynamic cockpit for a knowledge pilot, more a cage in an administrative factory farm. The beij cage multiplied across American offices. In nineteen ninety seven, nearly three decades after Action Office III was launched, it was estimated that more than three quarters of white collar workers were working in cubicles. The average cubicle had also halved in size between nineteen eighty seven and nineteen ninety seven.

Workers were packed in like eggs in cartons. The office has come a long way since the punch clock. In twenty twenty two, The New York Times reported that eight of the ten largest private sector employers in the US were carefully tracked king productivity metrics for individual workers, often in real time. There were Amazon Warehouse packers, ups, drivers, cashiers at Kroger, but there were also people who previously had been viewed as too skilled and perhaps too high

status to subject to second by second surveillance. The workers have noticed two One long running research project in the UK concludes that back in nineteen ninety, almost two thirds of employees felt that they were empowered to make decisions about the tasks right in front of them. By twenty twenty four, that proportion had fallen dramatically to one third. Workers don't decide how to spend their time from minute to minute anymore. The computer does. The Times found that

this sort of bosswear often seemed counterproductive. Grocery cashiers found themselves getting impatient with elderly customers for slowing down the checkout scan. Social workers who were counseling patients in drug treatment facilities found themselves marketers idle because they weren't sending emails. Middle managers at United Health knew the tracking system was flawed,

but couldn't fix it. According to the Times, they told employees to jiggle their mice during online meetings and training sessions. What Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, would have

made of all that? I do not know. But the more fundamental problem with workplace surveillance is the same as the problem George Nelson identified with Action Office I. Workplace surveillance treats workers as components in a system, and, as Nelson had complained back in the late nineteen sixties, that might indeed be what people did, but it wasn't what people were. Carol Kramer was one of these unwilling components.

She was the corporate vice president manager of a team of a dozen people, who found her employer had installed bosswear to take frequent snapshots of her screen and her chair to check that she was actually working. That raised all the usual questions about whether the software was really rewarding the right behavior. Did a conversation about workover coffee with a subordinate count? Did jotting some ideas on a piece of paper?

It wasn't just that the boss war could be stupid and blinkered. It was the whole idea that Carol couldn't be trusted to use her own judgment about how to work, when to work, and even shockingly, when there was more to life than working, working.

they'd forgotten, but she was also a human being. She quit. Robert Proops kept searching, with designs ranging from a hospital furniture system called costruck to a gigantic vertical timber harvester that looks like a modified mechanical excavator. He earned one one hundred and twenty patents, but by far his most important invention is the one that came to horrify him, the cubicle. At the age of seventy seven, he gave

an interview which has now become infamous. Not all organizations are intelligent and progressive lots are run by crass people. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them, barren rat hole places, barren rat hole places. The interview conveyed the bitter regret of a man who saw his life's vision twisted by avaricious fools. But should we really be surprised? George Nelson wasn't He saw it all coming,

but Robert proopst didn't want to hear it. And when George Nelson was proved right, Proops didn't seem to realize that the bosses who packed workers into cubicles hadn't twisted his vision at all, They had simply taken it to its logical conclusion. Two years later, he was dead. Proopst had loved the idea of the creative knowledge workers physically dynamic, always searching for new ideas, empowered by the workplace around them.

But he had also been a man who hated the thought of a wasted or inefficient movement so much that he'd laid in a hospital bed with a notebook conducting a time and motion study of the nurses who were caring for him. Would those nurses really have provided better care if they'd been rushing about on an optimized schedule.

Despite Nelson's warning, Proops never did seem to realize that there might be a conflict between helping workers to be empowered and creative and helping them to be maximally efficient. There's only one word for his well intentioned mistake, tragedy. Essential sources for this episode were Nikhil Saval's book Cubed and Jennifer Kaufman Buhler's book Open Plan, a design history of the American Office. For a full list of our

sources see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rusk. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos san Juan at Brain Audio. Bend A Dafhaffrey edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohene, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler,

Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It really makes a difference to us and if you want to hear the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm slash plus