Office Hell: The Demise of the Playful Workspace (Classic)

Pushkin. Hello Tim here, and we've got a classic episode of Cautionary Tales for you this week while I'm on my summer holidays office hell the demise of the playful workspace. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, maybe head over to Pushkin Plus because this Tuesday there'll be a brand new episode, another cautionary tale about a disastrous invention that shaped the office of Today. To subscribe, head to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts, or go to pushkin dot fm slash plus. As well as an exclusive show every month, you also get all episodes add free. Next week here on the main feed, we are back in action with a brand new episode of Cautionary Tales, all about the worst poet in the world.

See you then. By the end of the nineteen eighties, shyat Day was the most fashionable advertising agency on the planet. Then commissioned a short film by the director of Blade Runner Ridley Scott to launch the Apple Mac pioneered the idea of using Super Bowl spots to create news and made an unforgettable series of adverts in which the Energizer Bunny kept crashing through ads for other products, but an ad agency always needs to keep things fresh, and so in nineteen ninety three, the agency's boss, Jay Shyatt, announced a radical plan to give Shyat Day a jolt of creative renewal. Jay Shyatt was going to sweep away corner offices and cubicles and even desks. Armed with the best mobile technology that nineteen ninety three had to offer, Shayat

Day employees would roam free in open space, winning sales and creating great ads wherever they wished. What's more, these spaces would be playful, zany and stylish. Shayat hired the legendary architect Frank Gerry to work on the Los Angeles office, which boasted a four story sculpture for a pair of binoculars.

Curvacious two seater pods from fairground rides were installed with the hope that people would sit together in them and think creative thoughts. The New York office was designed by Gaetan No Peschet. It had a mural of a vast red pair of lips and a luminous, multi colored floor with hieroglyphs all over it. Eschet had a boyish sense of humor. The floor in front of the men's room had an illustration of a man urinating. His conference tables were made of a silicone resin that would amusingly grab and hold important papers during important meetings. Some of his chairs had instead of feet, springs, and they would wobble and tip back. Not so much fun if you happen to be wearing a skirt. But hey, creativity right from

a distance. People loved the shayat Day offices. Design magazines raved about the futuristic spaces. The agency even started charging to give paid tours of their offices. The New York Times architecture critic called the Manhattan office the apotheosis of the dream factory and declared that the agency staff were happily at home inside. The dream Time magazine added thoroughly armed with a modern weaponry of the road warrior. The telecommuters of Shayat Day are among the forerunners of employment in the information age. That's not wrong, laptops and mobile phones, hot desks in zany offices. Shayat Day really was ahead of its time. But the closer you got to that cutting edge of workplace design, the more likely you were

to get hurt. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. At first, the radically playful workspace seemed so brilliant. Jay Shyatt had been visionary in hiring Frank Garry a few years before he became the most famous architect on the planet. Equally visionary was Shyatt's idea that the office should be like a university campus. The idea is you go to lecture, gather information, but you do your work wherever you like, said Jay Shyatt. That idea is so influential that it's now a cliche. Microsoft has a campus, Pixar has a campus, Google has a campus, and many of the offices which regard themselves as cool today mimic Gaetano Peschet's bright colors, different architectural zones, and clusters of

couches interspersed with large tables. Shayat Day's free range office really was ahead of its time. But even before the full majesty of the shayat Day vision was unveiled, problems started to emerge. The agency had experimented by removing a few people's desks to see what would happen. Unfortunately, when what happened happened, they didn't seem to care. One of the Guinea Pigs was an associate director called Monica Miller.

She took her desk away. She got hold of a little red wagon, the classic children's toy. She described to the journalist Warren Berger how every morning should pile the little red wagon high with documents and files, then walk up and down the hallways of shy At Day looking for a desk left temporarily vacant. Everyone thought it was so cute, she said. I'd be trudging down the hall and they'd laugh and say, oh, look, here she comes with that little red wagon. It was like a bad dream, like a bad dream. Well, the New York Times did call it a dream factory. The laugh would be on those mocking colleagues soon enough. When they returned from their holiday break at the start of nineteen ninety four, the

hot desking era had begun. They were confronted with row upon row of lockers, less college campus, more junior high school. Jay Shyat had sneered dismissively that the lockers would be for people's dog pictures or whatever, But there wasn't room for much. People started hauling armfuls of paperwork along with their clunky laptops. Monica Miller, of course, had her little red wagon. Every day there'd be these frantic email messages like has anybody seen my binder? Does anyone know where my files are? She recalled. It was a colossal headache.

Part of the problem was simply that Jay Shyat's cutting edge idea had been so badly executed. Using a laptop and a portable phone seems mundane today, but back in the early nineteen nineties that sort of gear was expensive, temperamental, and clunky. Staff wouldn't take their phones or computers home. Instead, they'd sign them out each morning and return them to a concierge when they went home at night, and to save money, shay at Day didn't buy enough for all of the one hundred and fifty staff who worked in the Manhattan office. Instead, ill tempered cues formed like breadlines each morning at the concierge desk. Staff who lived near the office would show up at dawn, sign out a precious computer and phone, hide them somewhere, and then go

back to bed for a couple of hours. Senior staff would enlist their assistance to rise early and secure their kit. Damned if I was going to get up at six in the morning to get a phone recalled one. I had to put my foot down. I told my assistant, go in there at six in the morning, get me a phone in a computer, and hide it till I get there. I'm not sure that's what putting my foot down really means, but you get the gist. Rather than freeing people to work anywhere and any time that suited them, shy at Day's campus had staff queuing before daybreak, a basic equipment. In the Los Angeles office, people started using the trunks of their cars as filing cabinets, their head out to the parking lot whenever they needed a new document.

Staff in the Manhattan office, of course, could only dream of using cars as filing cabinets. The boss, Jay Shyatt, seemed to be in denial about how much paper and advertising agency needed. Paper was something he frowned on. He'd send emails around reminding staff that shyat Day was a paperless office. One creative director remembers Jay mocking the paper storyboards and demanding the removal of posters showing the agency's latest ads. But the truth was that paper was still an essential part of the creative flow. That was doubly true at an organization where people had to queue in the hope of scoring a laptop for the day, who would switch to digital in a world where they couldn't even be sure of getting a computer. The execution of

Hyatt Day's new office was disastrously bad, making false economies with clunky equipment. But Jay Schiatt made another mistake, one that was more serious, more fundamental, and much much more common. But he wasn't the first, not by a long way. A century ago, a French industrialist, Henri Fruges commissioned a rising star in the field of architecture to design some radical new homes for factory workers in Paysack, near Bordeaux.

The architect's name was Charles Edoin Genert Grig. Today we know him as Lokobousier. The Kabousier designed Cite Fruges to Paysack, a set of modern cubes stacked into family homes. The Korbuzier, of course, was the archmodernist, a man who dealt in minimalism and concrete. His vision couldn't be more opposed to the spring loaded chairs or four story sculptures of binoculars that adorned the offices of Shayat Day One creative director of Shayat Day described the experience of working in Gaetano Peschet's radical office as like sitting inside of a migraine.

How he must have yearned for the pared down minimalism of Lokorbusier. We are tired of decorps. What we need is a good visual laxative. Lukorbuzier once explained bare walls, total simplicity, that is how to restore our visual sense. And yet the humble factory workers didn't seem to see l Korbusier's vision quite like that. They hated it and they refused to move in. It was terrible, said one.

I felt as if I was being sent to prison. If you focus on the design, this seems paradoxical. Gary and Peschet and Jay Shiat were offering the workforce a playfully riotous explosion of visual stimulation or refuges, and Lokalbousier were offering the workforce bare walls and total simplicity. The design ideas were radically different. The reaction was the same.

People hated it. Cautionary tales will return after the break. In two thousand and ten, two psychologists at the University of Exeter Alex Haslam and Craig Knight conducted an experiment to test the impact of different office spaces on how much people got done and how they felt about it. Haslam and Knight recruited experimental subjects to spend an hour on administrative tasks such as checking documents, and randomly assigned these subjects to different kinds of office. There were four office layouts in the experiment. First was the minimalist office, a clean and spartan space with a bare desk, swivel chair, pencil and paper. Many people in Haslem and Knight's experiments found the sheer tidiness of the minimalist office oppressive. It

just felt like a show space with nothing out of place, commented one participant, adding you couldn't relax in it. The second office layout was nothing radical, no binocular sculptures or fairground pods. It was just the simple minimalist office with a few tasteful additions, some potted plants, some large framed prints hanging on the wall. The prince showed close up photographs of plants, vaguely evoking a Georgia O'Keefe painting. All simple enough, but people liked it. In the experiment, workers preferred the decorated office space to the minimalist one, and they got more and better work done there too. But this experiment wasn't really about the effect of having some greenery or a few pictures on the wall. What really

interested haslamon Knight wasn't pot plants. It was power. And so the final two office layouts used the same components as the decorated office. Visually, they seemed much the same, but there was an invisible distinction, something that made all all the difference between a pleasant space and a hellhole.

That invisible distinction was all about autonomy. The most successful office space offered the same tasteful prints and the same little shrubs, but it offered something else to control over the space. Participants were invited to spend some time arranging those decorations however they saw fit, or even having them removed to perfectly mimic the minimalist space if that's what they wanted. The researchers called this arrangement the empowered office.

The empowered office could be just like the minimalist office, or exactly like the decorated office, or it could be something else. The point was that the person working in the office had the choice. The empowered office was a great success. People got much more done there than either the minimalist or the decorated office, and they liked it more too. And you can guess what Alex Haslam and Craig Knight did to produce a hated environment. They simply said they were offering people control and then took the control away. They invited people to arrange the prints and the plants, but then at the last minute a researcher returned and undid all that personalization, instead setting everything up as it was in the decorated office. If they were

questioned or challenged, they simply said that the previous arrangement hadn't been suitable for the experiment. The scientists called this condition the disempowered office. People loathed it. I wanted to hit you, one participant told the researchers later, after the experiment had been explained, several people felt physically unwell. And remember, there was nothing actually wrong with the physical design of the disempowered office. It was exactly like the decorated office, which people had found perfectly pleasant. What mattered was the sense of powerlessness of implicitly being told that you'd done it wrong, that you weren't in charge, that you didn't matter.

The lesson office design doesn't matter nearly as much as letting people design their offices, and this explains why the simple clean homes that Enrive Fuge's commissioned for his workforce met with much the same revulsion as the crazy, chaotic workspace that Jay Shyat commissioned for his It wasn't a response to the esthetics themselves. It was a response to being powerless as those esthetics were imposed by an overconfident employer.

As one of J. Shyatt's deputies recalled, Jay didn't listen to anybody. He just did it. But this study doesn't tell us everything about why Jay Shyatt's experiment failed. The scientists looked only at how office aesthetics affected a worker's productivity on an administrative task, and people didn't just do admin At Shyat day, they came up with creative ideas.

When Gaetano Peschet and Jay Shyat swept away the cubicle farms and the office doors, they were trying to stimulate a certain kind of serendipitous, imaginative way of working together. Peschet thought that office doors and cubicle walls were just barriers to that creative teamwork. You don't need the office, he recalled in an interview with the Planet Money podcast.

His vision was different, somewhere that would encourage collaborative chat. It was an open space with a lot of corners, with a sofa, comfortable chair, with a coffee shop, because I think people when they meet, they'd like to have a drink. You can see the logic. A coffee shop is just the kind of place where you might serendipitously bump into a random colleague and unexpectedly have a creative conversation.

Sometimes you just want some peace and quiet. You felt totally exposed, recalled one executive at SHIAT day. There would be six conversations going on around you. I'd try to think, and I couldn't. We were the laughing stock of the industry. It was weird. You just had no idea where you should go. There was a rush for the only enclosed spaces in the place, the meeting rooms. The rooms would quickly fill up with people and then they'd say to everyone else, get out, this is mine. And what about when you wanted to talk to someone in particular and you just couldn't find them. When the journalist Warren Berger wrote an epic magazine feature about the Shayat day experiment, he titled it Lost in Space. I can remember coming

back from a presentation and being unable to find my creative department for two days, complained one creative director. Another developed what he called the three time around rule. If he walked around the entire office three times and he still couldn't find the person he wanted, he'd walk back to the concierge, hand back his laptop and his phone, and go home. And if someone needed me, they could find me on my virtual couch. It's hard to bump into random colleagues when everyone's given up and gone home.

And that's a proper because Shayat and Peschet weren't wrong about the need for personal proximity to spark creative conversations. Back in the nineteen seventies, a management professor named Thomas Allen measured how communication between workers dropped off exponentially as their desks were further and further away from each other fifty yards apart. And it was like they were in different states, different floors or buildings. They might as well have been different planets. Let's leave Jay Shyatt's unhappy nomads behind for a while and travel forward in time five or six years to another employer with a strong esthetic sensibility, a clear sense that he was right about everything, and a creative, collaborative office space to design. He needs no

introduction because Steve Jobs is one of the most famous entrepreneurs in history. He was the force behind the Apple Mac, the iPhone, those little round glasses. But for our purposes, he was the force behind the headquarters of Pixar, the animation studio that's produced films from Toy Story to Wally.

Steve Jobs was a man who hated ugliness and demanded beauty everywhere he looked. In Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, one of the saddest and most eloquent stories, describes Jobs semi conscious after receiving a liver transplant, ripping off his oxygen mask because it was ugly, and demanding that the medical team bring him five alternative designs so that he could pick the best. In happier times, he had much more to say about Pixar's headquarters. Construction budget was almost unlimited, and the building set in Emeryville, near Oakland and San Francisco was crafted in an industrial style, full of exposed steel, wood and brick, with Jobs obsessing over every detail. He poured over samples of steel from across the country and

selected a particular steel mill in Arkansas, which he judged to have the best color and texture. He insisted that the girders were bolted rather than welded, and the bolts were designed with circular caps to look like rivets, even though rivets hadn't been much used for half a century. Jobs commissioned a brick manufacturer from Washington State and told them to precisely match the bricks on the Hills Brother's coffee plant across the bay on the San Francisco waterfront.

Then Jobs kept sending back samples, insisting they didn't match the exact color palette he had in mind, until the manufacturer threatened to quit. Steve Jobs was one of a kind, but when it came to dictating how his underling's office spaces should look, you can draw a direct line from Henrifuges and Lokalbousier, through shayat Gary and Peschet to Steve Jobs.

That Pixar and Steve Jobs didn't limit himself to the patina on the steels and the palette of the bricks. Like Jay Shyat and Gaetano Peschet, Jobs had become fascinated by the idea of random meetings sparking creative conversations. Pixar's president Ed Catmill explained, Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture. Steve wanted the building to support our work by enhancing our ability to collaborate. Jobs hit upon a plan.

Headquarters should have just a single pair of large restrooms off the main lobby. People would make new connections or revive old ones because everybody would have to head to the lobby, brought together by a shared human need to urinate. It starts with the most benevolent aims, doesn't it. One moment you're trying to make a place that looks elegant and beautiful, the next you're trying to control people by manipulating their bladders. The road to office hell is paved with precisely the right color palette of good intentions. Cautionary tales will return in a moment. Localbousier had demanded a visual laxative with bare walls and total simplicity. The eventual residents of Paysack did not agree. They added old fashioned

shutters and windows. They erected pitched roofs over the flat ones. They put up flowery wallpaper over the uninterrupted monochrome walls, and marked out little blocks of garden with wooden picket fences. Their gardens were decorated with gnomes. I can't imagine anything that Steve Jobs would have hated more than a garden gnome.

Like Paysack's residents, Jay Shiatt's employees gradually began to chip away at the purity of his vision. They figured out a system where you could sign up in advance to reserve a particular place. Rather than queuing each morning for laptops and phones, they'd store them overnight in their lockers.

Makeshift desks started to appear, and before long desktop computers too. Hyatt Day's dream factory, like LeCorbusier's Paesak, was steadily being retrofitted by the people who had to live with it every day. These twentieth century cautionary tales feel to me like they have lessons to teach us about work life.

In the twenty twenties, On one hand, knowledge workers are finally equipped with genuinely portable computing technology, the kind of thing that might actually make a functional workspace out of Gaetano Peschet's cool sofas, hot desks, and nowhere to put your dog pictures. On the other hand, this technology means we could easily work from home during the pandemic, and much of the office workforce has since been in no rush to get back to the office. In the United States, for example, nearly half of all paid working days in twenty twenty one were worked from home. The figure barely shifted as effective vaccines were made available to everyone who wanted them. Instead of eagerly returning to their creative office

spaces to boldly strut from one collaborative huddle to another, people preferred to stay at home zoom call. Homeworking isn't always fun writing emails on a laptop while perched on a bed, or trying to stop the kids from crying during a client meeting. But many people noticed one thing that more than makes up for all these strains and sorrows at home. Nobody complains if you leave your dog pictures on your desk. People got a taste of control over their own space, and they didn't want to give it up. In surveys, one of the leading reasons that people give for working from home is the autonomy. Alex Haslam and Craig Knight could have predicted that it is no small thing to be the undisputed boss of your

own desk, but that's a problem for serendipity. Zoom is fine for the meetings we plan, but it's hopeless at facilitating chance encounters with colleagues we don't know so well. A large study at Microsoft during the first wave of the pandemic found that virtual workers tended to connect only to people that had already been close to And when we need to urinate, we're going to feel something very far from serendipitous to light if we bump into a random coworker outside our own bathroom door. When Steve Jobs got an important idea in his head, it wasn't easy to dissuade him. His plan to impose a single pair of serendipity inducing mega bathrooms on Pixar seemed to be a very important idea. Indeed, simity mattered, thought Jobs, and

he was right, And what better way to ensure that different people from different departments spent some time in close proximity than by forcing them all to go through the atrium several times a day at intervals governed by the call of nature. He felt that very very strongly, says Pam Kerwin, Pixar's general manager. So Jobs explained his idea to Pixar staff at an off site meeting, and the staff didn't like it at all. As Kerwin recalls, one pregnant woman said she shouldn't be forced to walk for ten minutes just to go to the bathroom, and that led to a big fight. Some senior Pixar staff stood up for the pregnant woman. Jobs was frustrated people just didn't understand the vision. They didn't get it. But then

Jobs did something extraordinary and out of character. He compromised The Steve Jobs building contains not one, but four pairs of bathrooms. There is still plenty of opportunity for serendipity thanks to an atrium that focuses activity, with the main doors of the building, a cafe, a game area, the mailboxes, three theaters, conference rooms, and screening rooms all spilling into it.

Pixar's bosses said that Jobs's basic instincts had been correct. I kept running into people I hadn't seen for months. I've never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one. People encountered each other all day long. Inadvertently, you felt the energy in the building.

No doubt that's true. But the serendipity at Pixar wasn't just down to Steve Jobs's ideas, but to his willingness to let them go. Junior staff were able to stand up to Steve Jobs, the owner, the legend, the control Freak's control freak, and get their own way about something that mattered to them, that was more important than all the bolted steel and elegant brickwork. Pixar's success could buy.

Inside Jobs's beautiful building, the Pixar staff ran riot. The most famous example is a concealed room that can be reached only through a crawlway, in which was originally designed merely to provide access to the air conditioning valves. Once a Pixar animator discovered the secret panel into the space, he installed Christmas lights, lava lamps, animal print furnishings, a cocktail table, a bar, and napkins printed up with the logo The Love Lounge the animators who work here are free to no encouraged to decorate their workspaces in whatever style they wish, explained the Pixar boss ed Catmore, they spend their days inside pink dollhouses whose ceilings are hung with miniature chandeliers, tiki huts made of real bamboo, and

castles whose meticulously painted fifteen foot high styrofoam turrets appear to be carved from stone. Steve Jobs apparently hated all that juvenile mess, but he let it happen, and the serendipity he craved became a daily feature of life at Pixar, even if not precisely as set out in his original blueprint.

Steve Jobs wanted to create an office space that would still be beautiful and functional in a century. Will have to wait awhile to know whether he succeeded. All we know is that Jay Shyat did not. He sold his company to a bigger advertising conglomerate, helped perhaps by all the attention that had been lavished on his radical office space.

Yet neither the Gerry offices in Los Angeles nor the riotous Gaetano Peschet offices in Manhattan survived the merger for long. The entire experiment had lasted just a few years. Jay Shyat declared that it was the only thing I ever did in business that I was satisfied with. Very few of his colleagues seemed to agree, and while the giant binocular sculpture remains in Los Angeles, the interior designs are long gone. In contrast, le Corbusier's modernist homes for work.

Because at Paysack did last a century, Paysack is now viewed as something of an architectural destination. It's full of people with money and modernist tastes, people who love Lokalbousier's visual laxative, even though they're very far from being the kind of people Paysack was designed for. Long after Lokorbuzier himself had died, these new residents cleared away the picket fences and the pitch roofs and the garden gnomes and restored the purity and simplicity of his original vision. But I don't think it's a coincidence that that vision withered when it was imposed on workers, and blossomed when people who loved it got to choose. As the pandemic receded and bosses started to worry that working from home was

undermining workplace serendipity. Many decided to mandate a return to the office. But maybe they should instead try harder to create the kind of office that workers will freely choose to come into. Maybe the principle for a flourishing creative space is that if we build it, they will come, provided we don't try too hard to control what happens there.

The Kobuzier himself might have agreed. When he was told about the garden Gnomes of Paysack, he said something that I wish all the tasteful, powerful people like Jay Shiatt could understand. You know, life is always right. It is the architect who is wrong. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at Timharford dot com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford, with and write. It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Edith Russlo. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohne, Littal Millard, John Schnaz, Carli Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, and Morgan Ratner. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It helps us for mysterious reasons, and if you want to hear the show, add free sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, Slash plus s

Office Hell: The Demise of the Playful Workspace (Classic)

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