Talk:Cubicle/Archives/2012

Action Office
The Action Office sections of this article are pretty much copies of the content of the Action Office article itself &mdash; pre-copyedit. Perhaps the sections should be removed in favor of a small blurb (and link)? — cyberbisson (talk) 17:43, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Wanted
Included a note about the movie. 70.44.38.134 (talk) 20:09, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

The perfect cubicle
I'd like to see a picture of this. I did a net search, only to find mirrors of this wikipedia article. At least a thorough description of the enhancements, saying "whimsical" does nothing to explain it. Thodin 03:53, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Pictures
C'mon, somebody should be able to illustrate this! I would, but I work from home, no cubicles to be seen. :-) Stan 19:21, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)
 * My intention is to eventually do small shape illustrations off all of the desk forms I am entering in Wikipedia, but I must admit that the cubicle desk illustration (or illustrations) is extremely low in my order of priority since it is one of the most boring ones. The interesting things about the cubicle desk do not come out well in a small outline illustration.  On the other hand, a small caricature of the cubicle desk would be fun, but I am unfortunately not a good caricaturist. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by AlainV (talk • contribs) 10:13, 1 November 2003.
 * Finally got photos --AlainV 00:29, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

There is no product called A Cubicle Desk.
L K Tucker This article misses the main feature of a cubicle, Cubicle Level Protection. Cubicles were the industry standard once the discovery of a conflict of physiology was made in the 1950's.

Manufacturer's are unwilling to reply or discuss this. I encountered this problem as a freshman engineering student in 1961/62.

The design features of Cubicle Level Protection prevent the occupant "Subliminally Seeing" movement to trigger peripheral vision reflexes. In a correctly designed Cubicle the occupant is positioned so that every thing they can see with peripheral vision is stationary.

If you have information or the name and date of the psychology, or civil engineering paper on this email me through VisionAndPsychosis.Net. Use any email link on the site.

If you know a designer or engineer willing to write an article for my site have them email me. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.158.184.138 (talk • contribs) 00:56, 8 October 2004.

L K Tucker 10/14/04 -- I returned to correct any errors I made in the re-write of the "Cubicle Desk" article. I find that the article has been reverted to the original incorrect text.

There is no "Cubicle Desk." It does not exist.

The author of this article has innocently crossed into an area where he or she has no expertise or knowledge.

Cubicles are a subset of Systems Furniture. Cubicles are designed to combat a problem of physiology discovered by the designers and engineers who built the first close-spaced workstations in the late 1950's.

The best course would be to remove the entire article and refer visitors to a correct article on Cubicles.

I can be reached by visiting my site http://VisionAndPsychosis.Net. The site is about the conflict of physiology not cubicles. But my Modern Cubicle page links you to the manufacturers where you can see the protective designs. There will be no mention of Cubicle Level Protection on manufacturer's sites. The manufacturers will not discuss this problem.

To verify this you must reach a design engineer. Sales or office staff at the dealers for these manufacturer's will not be aware of the problem. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.158.184.138 (talk • contribs) 23:36, 14 October 2004.
 * Can you cite articles or books which talk about this? I have references for everything I have written in this article, right at the bottom of the page.  And there are more, in the architecture magazines and office layout books I have read over the last years.  --AlainV 00:04, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * VisionAndPsychosis.Net is the citation. You will find links to the sources I use there.


 * You can verify this information by speaking to someone who teaches first semester psychology. Have them explain Subliminal Sight to you. Notice in the two pictures you used the computer work position faces into the corner and the worker's back is to the door.


 * The reference to the engineering discovery will be a statement like, "Subliminal Sight caused a problem in the early days of modern office design."


 * Phone any dealer for a Office Furniture manufacturer and ask to speak to the designer or engineer. Have that person explain Cubicle Level Protection and the need for it.


 * The dissociative mental break that is recognized appears as a short episode that resolves with no treatment.


 * I learned about this problem as an engineering student over forty years ago. I sat in a psychology lecture, 1990, where the phenomenon was explained.


 * You can also search civil engineering course abstracts for a course in Systems Furniture Design and call that instructor.


 * I FOUND THIS IDENTICAL ARTICLE on a site for a newsletter "Systems Furniture?"


 * I sent an email to that contact person but got no reply. If you are that person you should have contacts to verify this psychiatric injury exists.


 * YOU ARE CORRECT in that you will not find this anywhere else on the Internet. The manufacturers will not talk about this. Would you want to defend a lawsuit every time someone has a headache while using your product?


 * One of the main reasons my site exists is there is little knowledge of this problem. If almost no one is aware of the problem why would you expect to easily find information about it anywhere?


 * This is not secret information but you will only find it in the places I suggested above. I wrote several schools of architecture. None of the instructors in the departments were aware of the design requirement. Unless the student takes the course on Systems Furniture they would be unaware of the problem.


 * The Cubicle replaced the Desk. There is no product called a "Cubicle Desk. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 65.81.12.155 (talk • contribs) 21:10, 19 January 2005.


 * If you have seen an article identical to this one in a newsletter called "systems furniture" then it is a copy with which I have absolutely no connection. If your site is the only existing source on the Internet for what you advance, then it is not sufficient authority.  Once again, do you have other references? These do not have to be on the Internet, they can be articles or books. In the publications on office furniture which I have consulted there is no mention of what you are talking about. Look at it this way:  All the  Web sources and the published sources I have consulted during the last three years make absolutely no mention of your theory.  It might be true, and I must admit it certainly sounds plausible, on the surface, but if everybody else says something else than you concerning the origins of the cubicle, then how are we to know that they are all wrong and that you are right? --AlainV 01:23, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * There is no product called a Cubicle Desk


 * There is no point in repeating the information I posted twice in this discussion.


 * I do not have time to argue with you. There is no point to that either. I explained that this is not a theory. The entire office furniture business depends on the design features called Cubicle Level Protection. Businesses such as Herman Miller Inc., Steelcase, Knoll, Hon, Haworth and others around the world all use this design for Knowledge workers.


 * My site links to some of those and you can see the design features in the products they make. (The modern Cubicle page)


 * I gave you locations to verify that what I posted is true. I know it is hard to believe. Almost no one believes this the first time they hear it.


 * I will have an opportunity to visit an engineering library in the spring.(I am disabled and travel is difficult.) I am working on another project just now. If you wish to join the effort to inform the public about this you may quote from my site as long as there is a link used for citation. My site has copyright but the distribution is FREE.


 * The theory on my site is that this conflict of physiology is responsible for the increase in college suicides since the invention of the computer. But the existence of the problem and the fact that it was the reason the Cubicle was created is not theory.


 * Agreed that this should definitely not be under "cubicle desk". That term exists almost no where on the internet other than here, and where it does, it refers to a desk in a cubicle, not the cubicle + desk as a unit. With only 528 results on Google for "cubicle desk" at all, I think the evidence is pretty clear that there is no such beast. Dyfrgi 2005 March 3


 * I have no objection on a name change for the article for something better but if you look carefully at the results in Google for "cubicle", in the text search as well as the image search, you will find that many of the hits are totally irrelevant since they deal with cubicles for horses, cubicules for mice, storage containers, leisure home components, etc. etc. .  My use of "Cubicle desk" when I created the article was a way of creating a disambiguation.  Furthermore, if you do a Google search for pages containing the word cubicle and also containing the word desk you will get 314,000 results, and they will not deal with cubicles meant for animals or small building components or something else.  Finally, somebody else (not me) has made a redirect from cubicle to cubicle desk, solving the probleme of those who are looking for an office cubicle by just typing "cubicle". --AlainV 00:31, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Origin of Term
Any word on the first use of the term "cubicle?" I doubt it is the earliest, but I stumbled onto a 1941 patent referring to a bathroom stall walls assembly as a "cubicle assembly." http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=2240482 Hard (for me) to imagine pre-1940's "cubicles," but the phrase was clearly used (at least in a bathroom stall context) back then. --Jurisnipper


 * Just checked in an unabridged (20 volumes) edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The earliest use in English that they give as an example was in a publication by Caxton in 1482, where a person says "I was delyvered of a child in my cubycle". By that they mean bedchamber.  They note that it was widely use to mean bedchamber during the 16th century, and that in the following centuries it was used for al kinds of small chambers in homes, and eventually for small study spaces, such as carrels, in ediicational institutions.  --AlainV 03:12, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Cubicle in contrast to open space or to offices?
The article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of cubicles as opposed to completely open plans with flat desks, but what about the advantages and disadvantages of cubicles as opposed to "real" offices? Alluded to in terms of flexible floor plan and noise level, but not explicitly discussed. People who gripe about cubicles aren't complaining that they don't have a completely open floor plan; they're complaining that they don't have an enclosed office.

Gilmer 23:12, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * If cubicles are so good, why don't managers sit in one of those? :) 24.255.28.107 (talk) 19:58, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

great source for this article
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-moral-life-of-cubicles Mangostar (talk) 19:35, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Toilet cubicles
This seems to be a British.Australian/Irish (etc?) English term, judging by the results of A Google search, but here in the UK the individual stalls in a public toilet are very commonly called cubicles. This article assumes that "cubicle" only refers to offices, which in Britain at least is not true. It didn't seem sensible to add a whole new section just to say that, so I've added a hatnote here leading to our washroom article. Loganberry (Talk) 18:54, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Yech
Perhaps a bit of topic, but personally cubicles remind me of the way chickens are held. I find it kind of weird that well-paid workers don't insist on a proper office as the cost of office space is relatively small in comparison to their actual salary. I'd settle for a smaller car and have my own room, for example. I've never seen any cubicles in Europe (with comparable prices for office space) btw, which is interesting I think. Joepnl (talk) 23:20, 20 August 2009 (UTC)


 * For Germany, I can tell that cubicles are against the law. Every workplace has to be in a room with proper daylight, among other aspects. There can be multiple workers in an office, if the company so chooses, but it cannot choose to put them in isolated cubicles. If this hinders productivity, the company has to provide offices. For example, typists in Germany typically have offices with two workplaces. One office for every typist is too costly, but more than two in an office reduces productivity too much. Great rooms with many workplaces were tried in the 90s, but showed to be not a good idea. 91.1.243.24 (talk) 18:56, 3 December 2009 (UTC)


 * it would be interesting to know where these cubicles are used. Not in continental Europe. Never encountered them there. Great rooms with several clerks yes, but no boxes. Obviously the USA do. How about the UK?--85.180.14.63 (talk) 19:34, 8 September 2010 (UTC)


 * I missed your replies for a long time, sorry. For Holland I can find no laws regarding daylight. I think cubicles would be perfectly legal here (though people must have the right chairs, the right desk, and lots more). We do have what is called "office gardens", where people are somewhat separated (by cupboards, plants, etc), but definitely not like the jail-like cubicles. When there's plenty space a separate room for each employee still is very uncommon. Two or three people in one room would be preferred for social interaction. Even for large groups of people doing the same tedious work (like a helpdesk), cubicles would simply not be an option here. I think the article should at least tell the cultural differences between the US and for instance Europe, and preferably explain that difference. (this might be slightly related to At-will employment. Being kept in a cubicle is much more acceptable when you know that next year you'll be working elsewhere. An article like Cultural differences about labour would be very interesting in that respect) Joepnl (talk) 01:15, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Article opening
Even if it is true that the cubicle is the most important piece of furniture of the 20th century, that's an opening statement for an opinion piece, not for Wikipedia. If such a statement can, in fact be justified, it should be stated after, and only after, the reason why it is so. As in: "According to what XXX said in XXX publication on XXX date, the cubicle has XXX specificity which makes it the most important piece of furniture of the 20th century." Anything short of that is not only opinion, but gratuitous opinion. This maybe also belongs in its own paragraph, and not in the first one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eje211 (talk • contribs) 22:41, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Merger proposal
I propose merging Sea of cubicles here. That article borders on WP:DICDEF as is, and since it only describes an office with many cubicles, this seems like an appropriate place for what new information is there. --BDD (talk) 00:15, 20 April 2012 (UTC) Hearing WP:SILENCE over the course of two weeks, I'm implementing the merge and leaving Sea of cubicles as a redirect. --BDD (talk) 22:39, 4 May 2012 (UTC)