Doors are great inventions. Ever since the first cave man rolled the big rock across the opening of his cave to keep the saber-toothed tigers out when they were rummaging around for a late night snack, doors have served a purpose. They keep the undesirables out. They can let people in. They help turn on the light in the refrigerator when you want to get a late night snack. I do however think we have crossed into a questionable area on the relative utility of doors when we decided to put doors on cubes in the office.

That’s right, doors on cubes.

A closed door can present several messages. It can tell the world that you are busy and don’t want to be bothered. It can say that no one is home. It can say that I don’t want you to see what I am doing behind this closed door. I just can’t figure out what a door on a cube does. Especially a door that has glass windows in it.

Cubes were invented in the nineteen sixties by the Herman Miller Company. Until that time working space in the business consisted of rows of desks in an open room, very similar to the classrooms within schools, only with bigger desks. It seems Herman Miller was not satisfied with selling just desks to businesses so they came up with a modular arrangement that allowed them to sell walls and desks to businesses, thereby creating and expanding their market. It is rumored that they got the idea while watching a behavioral study in which a rodent was challenged to make its way through an ever changing labyrinth to get to its cheese.

However business was not entirely happy with the initial wall arrangement and required that the walls be lower so that management could continue to actually see employees doing their work. Hence the birth of the cube. A work area that gave the occupant the impression of having privacy while giving management the ability to continue to monitor the occupant.

The cube has evolved over time. Initially there were just cubes. Now there are low walled cubes, medium height walled cubes and high walled cubes. There are cubes of different sizes and various pleasing pastel color combinations. The idea here is that as you advance up the ranks of the organization, the height of the walls and the size of your working area advance along with you. Eventually, hopefully you reach a station in your business where your cube walls reach all the way to the ceiling and the size of your working area can support (gasp) the same stand alone desk that people had before there were cubes. When these work area standards are met, this is now called an office. Offices usually have doors, not cubes.

The doors on offices are usually solid with no windows. If you have walls to the ceiling and you close the door it is because you want something called privacy. Having a door with windows would seem to defeat this concept; hence most office doors do not have windows. We have all walked past closed office doors and wondered if anyone was in there, and if they were, what were they doing? If they had wanted you to know they would have left the door open.

Which brings me back to my original questions. Since when, and why, are they putting doors on cubes? We have already stated that the walls of the cube do not reach all the way to the ceiling, so putting a door on them cannot appreciable increase the privacy. This is especially apparent due to the fact that it seems that most of the doors that they are putting on cubes have windows in them.

So let’s review: the walls of the cube do not reach all the way to the ceiling so there is not much privacy when it comes to sound or noise containment. The doors that are being put on the cubes do not reach to the ceiling either so no help there. The doors that are being put on the cubes consist of a basic frame, the center of which is entirely made of windows. Windows made of transparent glass.

They are adding a door, something that can be closed as a sign of desired privacy, to a work area with walls that don’t reach the ceiling, and putting windows in it so that you cannot in fact get any privacy by closing it.

These guys at Herman Miller are brilliant.

What else can you say about a company that convinces their target market that they need to buy something that does not in fact deliver the functionality that it was designed to do, since the first cave man rolled the rock across the opening of his cave? These guys are now selling desks, walls and doors that still achieve the same functionality and privacy that was present when they were just selling desks into large open environments.

Now the only other explanation for this door on a cube concept that I have been able to come up with is that companies have come to the conclusion that the leap from open cube to closed office was just too great for most employees to be able to make. Having to go from low walls and no doors, directly into an area where the walls reached the ceiling and the doors shut out both the sights and sounds of the business, where there could be privacy, may have just proved to be too much for some.

Businesses must have recognized this facility based chasm and worked out a step whereby managers would not have to hurtle directly from the no privacy at all of a cube into the privacy rich environment of an office. The solution was simple: put a door on the cube as a mid way point in the transition. Besides after all those years in a cube without a door, the inhabitants could probably use some practice in how to properly operate a door anyway.

Have you ever heard the phrase “Dumber than a door knob”? I am sure that businesses didn’t have to hear that description about their management too many times before they took action to assure that their management members had the requisite training, practice and abilities to successfully make the cube to office transition.

It seems that either through the marketing brilliance of modular furniture suppliers, or business management process doors for cubes is here to stay. I was not around for the truly open environment of just desks in a work area. I am sure that I did not enjoy the maze where my cube was located when I was looking for my cheese. I am just not convinced that the solution is to put doors on cubes.