How Herman Miller’s innovative office design led to the dreaded

There are all sorts of innovators and all sorts of changes that have impacted office and workplace situations throughout the years. Automation, for one, is something that continues to re-mold many businesses’ workspaces. For example, that’s where AV Planners has made its mark, as an Audio Visual Integrator that specializes in commercial meeting room automation. That’s a topic area that didn’t even really exist a few decades ago.

And a few decades ago, an innovation came to the office that has, over the years, been received less warmly. In the 1960s, designers at the company Herman Miller came up with a flexible approach to creating office spaces—the cubicle. Its first iteration was a flop. But in the late 1960s, the company revamped the approach and the cubicle took off.

But today, there’s much about the cubicle that people love to hate. What was it intended as and how has it changed? This graphic explains it all.