cube redesign

[totient]

One of the things I like about Vanu is that the cube furniture there encourages communication and collaboration, by having cube groups with no walls between them, and configurable but mostly low cube-wall height between groups. But the standard furniture inside the cubes is terrible: the standard corner-desk with side wings arrangement which makes it impossible to fit more than one person in the workspace, with wing desks at the standard 30" height and only 19" deep instead of 24" making them too shallow for working on even with flatscreen monitors, and with super-deep corner units (for big CRTs, but no one has those any more) that further eat into the usable wing space. There are also rolling bookshelves and occasional tables, and a typical cube looks like this:
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The corner units have built-in keyboard trays with good adjustability, so I was able to get work done for the first week or so, but it wasn't a long-term solution. So, I pulled all of the cube furniture out of my cube, and also lowered one of the partition walls to about 3 feet high. I found a furniture piece that's intended to cover lateral file cabinets to use as a desk and installed it at a more reasonable keyboard height. The monitor stands allow adjusting them very very low, so I put them on top of the 36" cubewall. Now I have actual workspace, and there's room there for two people to sit and see the screen:


Another shot of my cube, from outside, showing my cube-neighbor's still-default configuration next to me:


Next up will be to swap parts between the two bookshelf things to make a single low, wide bookshelf/drawer unit which can roll under the desk, and put a couch in the space currently occupied by the bookshelves.

Comments

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Holy crap, I could never get ANYTHING done there. That's such a hostile work environment for anyone with anything vaguely like ADD.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

You'd have hated the space Permabit is in now. I thought I was going to hate it too, but I really liked it. I don't know if you recall Geo's rambling on the subject of his perfect space but what Vanu has is not too far away from it: cube furniture as social engineering force rather than as a way to save square feet.

My perfect space would be 1000-sf open plan spaces surrounded by single-person offices. Each person would have a desk in the open space *and* a single-person office. EVI did this and found that it took 160sf per person including hallways, which is half again what you can accomplish with just offices and twice what you get with just cubes.

[visage.livejournal.com]

Our previous space had much better cubes for the "being able to concentrate" value.... I was pretty disturbed when I saw the current space.

...but then, I've taken the opposite approach and built up my cube walls so I had fewer visual distractions. =)

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

The last time I was in a cube farm, I replaced the cube desk with a real Steelcase desk that faced out into the hallway. I was much happier being able to look outside and see trees instead of a carpet covered cube wall, and I liked not having to worry about people looking over my shoulder.