Today’s Office Design Is Not What It Used To Be
“The reason we have offices hasn’t changed in a hundred years, but the way we accomplish work there has. Offices, fundamentally, are a work-oriented space made for people to accomplish their tasks. But it wasn’t until 1911 that one individual, a man named Frederick Taylor, decided to streamline office work and compartmentalize tasks into discrete entities. Good for efficiency, bad for the people: repetitive tasks became the norm, and office design changed to discourage socialization. Taylor saw the office worker as lazy, developing the need for office controls and strong management surveillance.”
“Due to this change in attitude, in the early 1900’s office design started to move away from a social, flexible atmosphere into a rigid, compartmentalized structure, running more like an assembly line than a social space. Taylor designed offices where managers in private offices looked out over employees working in a completely open space. Utilitarian in nature, office art would have been regarded as unnecessary.”
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