There is something about open spaces designs that triggers in me a profound and unmistakable feeling of nausea, a feeling of discomfort and unease. I fear these moments when I have to set foot on a new floor only to discover a large, wall-free environment, where human beings are authorised to roam like herds of primal mammals. One can often see them engaged in constant, pointless, micro-migrations, displaying behaviours that could only be excused if broad-casted on the Discovery Channel. When that happens, I often freeze, hit by what I can only described as a sudden blizzard of mediocrity, a chilling wind allowed to flow freely all over the air; carrying promiscuous diseases allowed to permeate everything, weakening the mind as surely as a 50 pages powerpoint presentation (one of those which purpose often seem to be to display the full Microsoft’s clip-art from the 90’s than to convey any sort of meaningful message.) You expect the rancid smell of death and more often than not, you get that of microwaved fish curries - clear symbols of the resilience of odour molecules and the advance of onshoring. You stand there, just outside the elevator. You’re about to puke, you shiver, you nearly lose balance, you think: “Focus, Focus, Focus”. And you walk, fast, to somewhere - anywhere - just to avoid that moment of clarity that could only force you to walk back in the elevator, away from what you know will only be a cheap dress rehearsal rag of what you’d expect to find in hell. It’s pretty much like any Adam Sandler movie: you think you can do it, you hope it’ll be better than the last time, but you know seconds in, all you’re going to experience is a dry session of water-boarding that would make the CIA proud.
For all the noise about collaboration, productivity gains and social advancement of the human race, open spaces’ are nothing but a puny attempt by management to reduce costs or - should I say to be of the positive kind - to improve surface productivity management. As with everything else though, it’s someone looking for a bonus, looking for an excuse, looking for an easy way to measure, catalog and price change. It’s primal capitalism at its best, and like reality TV: who care about the outcome, if you get the audience? Meanwhile, the average worker will find in the new arrangement a way to justify a regression to the mean, which more often that not will only mean that the last few who used to work pretty hard will finally give up, now forced to spend as little time as possible in a place which now deliver as much joy and happiness as a congregation of Calvinists debating the moral dilemmas of the Internet on TV (oh, the irony!)
An open space is a depressing sight. The idea that such an amount of collegiate stupidity can be seen as a necessary step towards the advancement of any organisation (if not mankind), that it is desirable celebrate idiocy on such a large scale, is saddening. But the fact that HR departments and executives continue to spin the wheel, pretending that there's more to open space than making more money, is probably the part that should tell you it's time to move on, even if it's only to find a more subdued form of the same predicament. A bit of honesty would go a long way; because we all know what's going on here. We all know it's all about bringing Communism into the workplace.
What is the objective of open plan design if not the provision of complete equality where the engineer rubs shoulder with the labourer; where the cleaner embraces a glorious future in the presence of the executive and the farmer is just grateful to be alive, outisde; trading fresh supplies for petrol or his daughter for a car. We're back in Karlstadt, back in the midst of a world of love and unrestricted, unconditional emotional attachment from which will derive utopias that are too wild to have been imagined yet. It may have failed before, but trust the private sector to recycle everything, including a version of socialism that promised milk and honey for every single soul on earth! It's a PPP for the workers! And the private sector being that much smarter there is no doubt that any of the pitfalls, errors, frustrations that finally managed to break an Empire down will never, ever, affect their organisations, that productivity will rise and people accept to reduce their wages just to work there, in the warm, feeding breast of the New Jerusalem. Hallelujah! Hallelujah for Open Spaces!