‘This boundless region, the region of le boulot, the job,
il rusco – of daily work, in other words – is less known
than the Antarctic’
Primo Levi1
After the cattle-truck incarceration of the commuting train, you arrive with some relief at your own mini-fiefdom which, according to UK law, must occupy at least eleven cubic metres: the office desk and its environs. With the possible exception of our beds, many of us spend more of our lives here than anywhere else. But if work is a territory that is too familiar to be colonised by knowledge, as Primo Levi suggests, then the office desk is a true terra incognita. No unintrepid explorer has yet planted his flag on its laminated top. Like much to do with modern office life, it is an American invention – and its design, contents and location are a little primer in office politics.
Billy Wilder’s classic film The Apartment (1960) is, among other things, a narrative about the role of the desk in post-war office life. As the film begins, the camera pans across a huge office made up of serried rows of identical desks, all facing the same way and receding into apparent infinity. In America, this layout was known unflatteringly as the ‘bullpen’, to suggest either the stockyard or the sweaty, crowded area where baseball pitchers warm up. Somewhere in this endless sea of desks, the camera finds our hero, C. C. ‘Bud’ Baxter (Jack Lemmon), a lowly insurance clerk in a large corporation called Consolidated Life, working at desk number 861 on the nineteenth floor. Desk number 861 is, like all the others, a descendant of the Modern Efficiency Desk, first made in 1915 by Steelcase Inc. for the New York offices of Equitable Assurance. This desk, which was a simple, rectangular table with small drawers, replaced the cabinet-like desks, with their high backs made up of little drawers and cubby holes, which dominated office life before the First World War. At their new efficiency desks, office workers could be watched, monitored and subjected to time-and-motion studies. They had to keep files and letters moving quickly from their in-trays to their out-trays, rather like a factory assembly line.
By lending his apartment to his seniors for their extramarital affairs, Baxter begins to move up the corporate ladder. Promoted to ‘second administrative assistant’, he puts his few belongings – Rolodex, diary, pen, papers – in a cardboard box, and the camera follows him as he walks through the ocean of desks into his own office, one of the small rooms around the side of the floor, with large windows for easy surveillance of the bullpen. Eventually, he is promoted to the twenty-seventh floor, where female secretaries serve as gatekeepers to the male executive’s hallowed private space. Baxter’s final reward at the end of the film is a panelled corner office, with an artfully angular desk and a leather swivel chair. Naturally, he gives all this up at the end of the film for the charms of a lift attendant played by Shirley MacLaine.
That is what work desks used to be like. The American Business Etiquette Handbook for 1965 advises employees:
Avoid over-decorating your desk or area. When your desk shelves and wall space are covered with mementos, photographs, trophies, humorous mottoes and other decorative effects, you are probably not beautifying the office; rather you may be giving it a jumbled, untidy look. You may also be violating regulations against using nails in the walls … 2
Before the Second World War, executive desks were dark-wood, Georgian, pedestal types. When high-status office furniture began to be made for the mass market in the US in the 1950s, it deliberately eschewed this antique style in favour of light-coloured desks with rounded or angled corners, not unlike dining tables.3 The executive’s office became like a domestic interior, no longer burdened with the fuss and mess of bureaucracy: ‘Anyone who entered would immediately perceive that this was a man, freed from mundane traffic with papers and pretensions, who had attained a state of pure function.’4 Unlike the office drone’s desk, executive desks were heavily accessorised with things like cigar lighters, electric pencil sharpeners and Newton’s Cradles (those clacking steel balls that demonstrate the law of conservation of momentum). America pioneered this market in prestige, but the same basic rules applied elsewhere: you won status with a larger desk, more space around it, and best of all your own office. The British civil service, for example, measured the subtlest distinctions in service grades through precise allocations of desk type, carpet and square feet of floor space.
Around the time that The Apartment was made, however, the nature of the office began to change. The salaries of office workers had fallen behind those of many manual workers and, rather than trying to compete on pay, firms tried to brighten up their offices to attract staff. Adverts for clerical jobs in London in the 1950s began to use phrases like ‘modern’ and ‘friendly’ to describe offices, particularly to attract women.5 Much of the new office technology was marketed at women, from lipstick-coloured telephones to Marcello Nizzoli’s much-imitated, curvaceous designs for Olivetti typewriters. One 1960 typewriter advert showed a female secretary dressed in black tie and tails at a typewriter blown up to the size of a grand piano: ‘You are the artiste … Your touch on the keys, your virtuosity produce the accomplished results which ensure your Chief’s “applause” and a universal ovation!’6
At around the same time, in the late 1950s, the German consultancy Quickborner was developing the concept of Bürolandschaft (office landscaping), which reinvented the office as a free-flowing, open-plan space, with desks arranged not in regimented rows but in ‘islands’. All workers, including executives, were given roughly the same amount of space, and could personalise it with pot plants, photos and keepsakes. In America, the designer Robert Propst had a similar idea while employed as director of the research division of the furniture company Herman Miller. ‘Today’s office is a wasteland,’ he wrote in 1960. ‘It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.’7 Propst developed ‘Action Office 2’, a modular office system marketed by Herman Miller in 1968. Its chief innovation was the partition panel, a screen between four and six feet high, covered in padded fabric, which became an omnipresent means of dividing space and providing some privacy in open-plan offices. For Propst, it was a way of giving workers control over ‘exposure overload’ and the ‘continuous idiot salutations’ necessary in bullpen offices where workers had to ‘invest in a recognition act every time someone goes by’. The panel was also a blank canvas on which people could stick pictures and notices, to ‘explain our work, define our individuality and relieve our memory’.8
Of course, the new open-plan office had another advantage: it saved money. In traditional offices, there is a lot of redundant square footage taken up by linking corridors and the areas behind doors. An employee sitting in an enclosed, one-person office is literally a waste of space. Conveniently, partitioned spaces also have higher tax write-offs than offices with fixed walls.9 The open-plan office is supposed to sweep away outdated hierarchies and inefficient bureaucracy, fostering teamwork and creative interaction. The unsurprising reality is that, however our desks are arranged, our colleagues can be irritating as well as helpful, and the competition for status and hierarchy is as resilient as ever. At Hewlett-Packard, a pioneer of open-plan office spaces, one of the most common items supplied by the corporate nurse was earplugs.10 The partition panel became the raw material not for Action Offices but for cubicles, those universal signifiers of American white-collar alienation, immortalised in Scott Adams’ Dilbert books. Propst realised to his horror that ‘not all organizations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them.’11
In Britain, there were other, unforeseen problems with communal offices. In 1968, the Observer magazine ran a feature titled: ‘Would you let your daughter work in an open-plan office?’ One male employee, it discovered, ‘suffers from visual distraction. He has to turn his desk sideways to avoid seeing the miniskirts.’12 In an age when good secretarial skills were at a premium, women could demand a ‘modesty board’ – a piece of plywood stretching across the desk front – as a perk and status symbol. Two out of three secretaries, the Daily Mirror reported, wanted modesty boards ‘to stop the boss peering at their legs’.13 A simpler solution – allowing women to wear trousers to work – did not arrive in most British firms until the mid-1970s.
The dilemma of the open-plan was how to gesture towards egalitarianism while satisfying the human need for status-markers. In the late 1960s, for example, the British civil service tried to economise on desk size. A range designed for the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works broke the desk up into separate units for different tasks, such as a space for writing work, a telephone table, a storage unit, and so on. 14 A worker who needed more space could put in an application for more units, which could be added to the original in a honeycomb pattern. Rather than fretting about different types and sizes of rectangular desk, civil servants gained kudos by adding units. Hierarchies remained, but they had been rationalised. A similar compromise occurred in some open-plan Japanese offices. The desks of the higher-ups were at one end of the room, with their subordinates arranged in hierarchical order all the way down to the ‘bottom’ of the room, near the entrance. If you wanted to talk to people at the ‘top’, you had to make your way through the human shield of their underlings, which protected executives from routine inquiries.15
IBM’s launch of the personal desktop computer in 1981 created a new type of desk: the workstation. And an unintended consequence of the arrival of the workstation was that it made office chairs more important. Before the 1970s, it was generally believed that there was a textbook way to sit in a chair, with both feet flat on the floor, knees together, legs bent at right angles and the back straight. Since it was up to the worker to sit up straight, chair designers focused on creating designs that symbolised status rather than on improving posture. The contrast between high-backed, throne-like executive chairs and small-backed, armless secretarial chairs for dainty ladies survived well into the 1960s. Height had such status value that few chair seats would screw down below eighteen inches, even though the average woman’s leg was more like sixteen inches from the underside of the thigh to the floor.16 This status-consciousness was complicated by the new science of ergonomics (from the Greek ergon ‘work’ and –omics ‘to manage’), first used in cockpit design during the Second World War and then applied to offices, which sought a more efficient relationship between people and their working environments. By the 1970s, this science was suggesting that chairs should not support one ‘correct’ posture but encourage motion, allowing workers to spread the strain of sitting across their various body parts. All this emerged at the same time as the computer was encouraging workers to hunch forward and move about less. Mindful of ever-more stringent health and safety regulations, companies took note.
The father of the modern, ergonomic office chair was Bill Stumpf, who as an academic and designer at the University of Wisconsin in 1966 began studying orthopaedic data and examining the movements of office workers at desks with the aid of time-lapse photography. After joining Herman Miller, Stumpf wrote a paper called ‘A chair is a chair is a problem’ which argued that ‘many of us spend eight hours a day in a chair that is uncomfortable, that restricts our movement and inhibits our performance’.17 Stumpf’s solution came in 1976 with the Ergon chair. It had all the essentials of today’s swivel chair: moulded, foam-filled back and seat, armrests up at desktop height, gas-lift levers to adjust the height and tilt, and five-star legs on easy-glide castors. One sceptical customer said it looked ‘like two hemorrhoid pillows put together to make a chair’.18
The ethos of ergonomics is egalitarian: a comfy chair is seen as an inalienable human right. But the distinction between basic operator chairs and smarter managerial chairs survives. The latter tend to be higher-backed with wider seats, leather covers and more generous padding, including ‘memory foam’, which responds to the sitter’s body shape. Sophisticated specifications also denote status gradations. Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf’s bestselling Aeron Chair, first produced in 1994, is the ultimate, de luxe place to park your behind. It is ‘biomorphic’ to adapt to the curves of the human body, and minutely adjustable with levers and pulleys. It comes in three sizes to accommodate (the promotional material says tactfully) ‘those in a broader range of the anthropometric scale’. Its back and seat are made up of a flexible mesh, which prevents heat build-up and adapts to the sitter’s shape. Trendy companies like the Aeron chair not only because it shows how much they care about their workers’ delicate bottoms, but also because the mesh seat lets more light into the office.19
Even an entry-level Aeron, without all the fancy extras like tilt limiters and extra back-support options, will cost several hundred pounds. So it has tended to inhabit the loft-office spaces of dotcom entrepreneurs rather than, say, the offices of impoverished academics. (Like most people, I have to make do with a bog-standard descendant of the Ergon.) In 2004, the Sun expressed outrage that the Ministry of Defence had bought an Aeron chair for each of the 3,150 civil servants in its main building in Whitehall, at the same time as ‘squaddies in Iraq have to buy their own boots and sleeping bags’.20 Infinite adjustability is all very well, it seems, but not for public servants at the taxpayer’s expense. Give them an Ergon, and they can swivel on that.
The arrival of the PC also meant that the main purpose of the desk was now to provide a home for the computer. The computer is usually bulkier than the typewriter, it comes with all sorts of paraphernalia like mouse mats and wrist rests, and its cables need to be neatly hidden round the back of the desk, routed down its hollow table legs or tucked inside nearby partition panels. With the rainbow-coloured, translucent iMac an honourable exception, the desktop computer is generally a grey, standard-issue box. The Olivetti approach to office appliance design, which valued originality in each item, has been roundly trounced by the IBM approach, which promoted the virtues of predictability and standardisation. Office design is now all about how objects fit together as part of a system. Beauty has been sacrificed for order.
This suits most office designers and companies, who have long been suspicious of desk clutter. Some firms do not even allow employees to have personal items on their desks, in case their idiosyncratic mess scrambles the signals of the company’s corporate branding. And these advocates of clean designer workplaces have found an unlikely ally in the fashionable mind-body-spirit movement. Guides to office Feng Shui advise workers that ‘keeping your personal space in order opens the flow of chi and stimulates your creativity’.21 Firms of ‘deskologists’ offer to cure you of ‘irritable desk syndrome’, de-cluttering your workspace if you are too lazy or inept to do it yourself.22
Look around any office today, however, and you will see that this war against clutter has been lost. An academic survey of office workers in Orange County, California, found that they displayed an average number of 9.6 personal items on their desks and that the more they were allowed to personalise them, the happier they were with their workspaces.23 One of the main effects of these desk accessories is to subvert the functionalism of the office. There is a whole office supplies industry that answers to this need for uselessness in the form of banana-shaped pens and nose-shaped pencil sharpeners. Workers display deliberately bizarre items like nodding dogs, ugly trolls or grow-a-heads (heads with grass growing out of the top instead of hair) which they would regard as far too kitsch to have in their homes. The infamous sign ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here … but it helps’ is now extinct, but its successors are everywhere: ‘So far today I only made one mistake … I got out of bed.’ ‘I’m busy now, can I ignore you some other time?’ ‘I can only please one person per day: today isn’t your day and tomorrow doesn’t look good either.’ Like much generic office humour, these signs are both subversive and fatalistic: they gesture towards the messy politics of work and then universalise them, making them seem like a feature of offices everywhere. Some jokey accessories are fairly close to the bone, however, like the ‘Office voodoo kit’, which consists of a cloth doll of an office worker, with white pins for good spells and black pins for bad ones. (This product comes with the helpful disclaimer that it ‘is a novelty item only and is not intended to cast actual spells’.)
The psychologist Sam Gosling has identified three different types of clutter on desks. First, there are ‘identity claims’, such as photos of family, friends or pets, designed to create a certain impression among our colleagues or remind us of life outside the office. Second, there are ‘thought and feeling regulators’, items designed to improve or sustain our mood, a growing area of the office accessories industry. You can buy stress balls and stretchy men on which to sublimate your passive aggression; Zen gardens of white sand and rock, with little bamboo rakes that allow you to pattern the sand into therapeutic shapes; or a ‘beach in a box’ with a miniature deckchair, parasol, sea shells and sand. Third, there are ‘behaviour residues’, the less-conscious traces left by our habits and routines: the discarded coffee cup with green mould inside it, the dead plant you forgot to water, the keyboard coated with unidentifiable gunge, and the dozen sticky notes crowding your monitor, which, according to Gosling, are a sign of ‘overwhelm’.24
The ubiquitous sticky note, first marketed by the American firm 3M in 1980, neatly encapsulates why the company war against desk clutter has been lost. Modern office work is multifaceted. Items can no longer simply cross our desks in one movement, from the in-tray to the out-tray. Those piles of paper spread across the whole desk may look like chaos to the untrained observer. But some office analysts suggest that a messy desk, far from being evidence of an untidy mind, can actually function as an efficient ordering system, with the more important stuff where you want it to be, at the top of a pile.25 One office worker, interviewed for a study by the Work Foundation on office space, argued that there was method in his mayhem: ‘My in-trays are always full and I have since abandoned them to simply hold desktop detritus. I have different degrees of “in”, depending on how many things I need to get through … I try to operate a hierarchy of surface areas …’26 In this more fluid, unstructured environment, the sticky note reminds us of some job we need to do when we get round to it.
But our nesting instincts, which can turn the desk into such a chaotic personal space, conflict with one of modern office life’s harsher realities: our desk is no longer our own. In 1985, Philip Stone and Robert Luchetti wrote a seminal essay, ‘Your office is where you are’, in the Harvard Business Review. Stone and Luchetti came to bury what they called ‘Cubicleland’. Offices should be redesigned as ‘activity settings’, they argued, with a private ‘home base’ for each worker supplemented by access to shared facilities and communal areas. They even suggested giving employees an expense budget with which they could purchase access to these spaces as and when they needed them.27 This article spawned a movement known as ‘alternative officing’. It gained momentum during the economic boom of the late 1990s, when trendy ad agencies and PR companies in London and New York redesigned their offices, dividing them up into quiet ‘chill-out’ or ‘Zen’ zones with beanbags and sofas, ‘chaos’ spaces with meeting tables for exchanging ideas, and ‘touchdown areas’ with breakfast-style bars and laptop connections.
The sworn enemies of the alternative office are territoriality and permanence. Office space needs to be adaptable to ‘churn’, the term used for moving workers or equipment around, the rate of which grew by 14 per cent during the 1990s.28 In the words of one New York consultant, new office furniture tries to be ‘less Dilberty’.29 Office furniture companies offer a basic ‘vocabulary’ which allows desks and workstations to be ‘highly configurable … with flowing, fluid shapes, that grow, flex and adapt to change over time’.30 Screens and canopies are not boringly right-angled, but at 120-degree angles to produce pleasing honeycomb shapes. Desks are rounded to form a kidney-bean shape, with employees seated in the centre of the curve so that they are surrounded by work surface. Overhead poles, tiles and panels offer various ‘wire management solutions’, but the ultimate dream is the cableless office, which will detach computers from desks and unchain workers from workstations. There is an architectural evangelism about alternative officing which assumes that people’s ways of working will be transformed by a curvy desk or a translucent work surface. For all the revolutionary rhetoric, the British economy is dominated by small companies with limited budgets, which manage to get by with desks that are tediously rectangular.
The alternative office has suffered the same fate as the 1960s open-plan office: its loftier ideals have lost out to the more prosaic aims of saving space and money. In the 1990s, under pressure from shareholders and rising rents, many firms tried to cut ‘occupancy costs’ – that is, the costs of renting, servicing, lighting and heating their buildings. They looked for measurable notions of a building’s ‘performance’, such as comparing the money earned by employees for the firm with the expense of housing them at their desks.31 On these purely utilitarian grounds, the desk is an under-used resource, occupied for an average of 45 per cent of office hours. The rest of the time its occupant will be in meetings, seeing clients, training or off work.32
One solution is for workers to share their desks. In the system known as ‘hotelling’, they book in each day with a ‘concierge’. The concierge takes their possessions out of a locker, wheels them in a portable filing cabinet to their designated desk, uses a smart card to reroute telephone calls, and sets up personal items such as stationery and even family photographs.33 Once the desk is vacated, the concierge clears and cleans it for the next occupant, just like a hotel room. In ‘hot-desking’ – a term possibly derived from ‘hot-bunking’, where sailors on watch share bunks, sleeping in the warm pit left by the last man rather than bothering to change the sheets – workers simply have to grab the first desk that is available. The sexy names given to these cost-effective forms of musical chairs suggest the libertarian, nomadic ethos of the alternative office. Certainly, ‘hot desk’ sounds more exciting than ‘shared desk’ or ‘no desk’.
For all their passionate advocates, however, hotelling and hot-desking have not yet made any great inroads into the resilient territorialism of the office. Shared workspaces have given rise to the predictable phenomenon of ‘warm-desking’, where workers deprived of a permanent desk lay claim to a temporary one, spreading their coats, mobile phones and general mess around according to the law of first possession.34 Surveys of workers invariably suggest that, although they do not necessarily want the seclusion of their own private offices, they do want control of their personal space, which means their own desk.35 When firms try to wrestle their employees from their desks in the name of creativity and innovation, the employee is entitled to respond: work is work. It is fine to make it more pleasant and agreeable, but dishonest to pretend that it is something else entirely. If you want me to work, I need somewhere to do it. So please, if it’s not too much to ask, can I have my desk back?