Hey, Dilbert! Meet The Cubicle's Inventor -- No Pointy-Haired Boss, He Got Workers Out Of The Box

Popular lore about that ubiquitous feature of office life in the 1990s - the cubicle - suggests that its inventor must be a heartless organization man intent upon keeping workers in their place.

But to visit Bob Propst in his office near Redmond is to see a reality far different than the one portrayed by cartoonist Scott Adams in his "Dilbert" comic strip.

In a suite divided by movable panels, Propst holds forth on such business concepts as "a sense of belonging," "support and companionship" and "spontaneous combustion."

He's been using those words since 1968, when he revolutionized the workplace with his manifesto, "The Office: A Facility Based on Change," and a new line of furniture designed to change the way people work.

"Systems furniture," as the office-furniture industry calls his 30-year-old concept of modular walls, desktops and shelves, has become the standard environment of most U.S. office workers.

Herman Miller, the Michigan company Propst worked with when he invented what has come to be known as the cubicle, has sold $6 billion worth of the furniture. Competitor Steelcase's sales stand at $8 billion.

Isolated, cell-like cubicles were the last thing he had in mind. In fact, Probst originally used the terms "cubical enclosure" and "cubicle office" to describe the private offices he rebelled against.

At 77, Propst doesn't stand as straight or move as fast as he once did, but he still works every day. Moving among the furniture he invented, he eagerly explains his concept of making the world more productive by making the workplace flexible and congenial.

Propst is an artist, engineer, deal maker, inventor and keen observer of human behavior. Since the 1950s, he has received 126 patents for inventions that include office furniture, an automated pulp-tree harvester, a chair for quadriplegics, and products for hospitals and hotels.

He pauses in front of a chest-high work space and sits on his "perch," a tall, small-seated wheeled stool that is one of his 126 patented inventions.

"It was invented because you ought not to be sitting so much," he says.

Of all Propst's innovations, perhaps the most significant is one underlying his modular furniture: the idea that random meetings of people are critical to business innovation and that those meetings can be promoted by the geometry of office furniture.

Thirty years after he invented modular furniture to foster such encounters, Propst finds Microsoft's construction of buildings with long hallways and private offices "a very odd decision."

"They have too much of a tendency to arrange themselves in a linear manner, which is the most difficult of all geometries to generate spontaneous interactions," he says.

He recalls meeting a University of Michigan psychology professor who was eagerly awaiting his move to a new building so he would no longer be disturbed by people asking for directions as they got off the elevator outside his office. The irony is that the greatest work of the professor's career was done in collaboration with a math professor he met in exactly that way.

"The health, vitality and future of organizations depend on the random and unexpected, sometimes contrary or alarming, contacts with the rest of the world," Propst says.

His idea was to get office workers out of the undivided rows of desks known in the 1950s and 1960s as "bullpens" and to bring bosses out of isolated private offices. With modular walls of varying heights, he envisioned workers poking their heads over or around panels like gophers.

His concept for a new line of furniture drew the attention of Herman Miller Chief Executive D.J. DePree. The men set up a partnership, with Propst founding the Herman Miller Research office in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Propst studied the offices of such "super-performers" as Polaroid camera inventor Edwin Land, anthropologist Margaret Mead and comedian Steve Allen. He interviewed office workers in the trenches and used time-lapse photography to document their behavior.

The time-lapse studies showed workers wrestling with unmanageable stacks of papers. And they revealed what Propst came to call "the `idiot salutation' problem: Every time somebody goes by, you say, `Hello, Joe.' "

He designed work spaces with plenty of shelves that allowed workers to sort their papers. He used dividers to give them a semi-private work space.

"Some enclosure, even a little, gives support and companionship," he says. "We found that panels have an amazing socializing effect as long as you don't arbitrarily close them off all the time."

Propst wasn't the first designer to use partitions. "What was so successful was the synthesis of it all," says Chris Carron, curator of collections of the Public Museum of Grand Rapids, Mich.

Says Phil Strengholt, who retired last year as a Herman Miller vice president: "The word `system' had never, ever been used in a furniture environment. It's a series of pieces. If you put the pieces together like an Erector set, you can create a variety of offices."

When Propst and his wife and business partner, Lee, decided to leave Herman Miller,they looked for a city with a business community that was open to innovation. They settled near Redmond in 1979.

There they live and work on a 30-acre forested hillside above Lake Sammamish. The offices of the Propst Co. are divided with the curved and angular panels Bob Propst designed. In a basement shop, he recently produced prototypes for a silicon-and-Styrofoam substance for lighter-weight office panels and an electronic probe to test concrete before it is poured.

Propst's biggest commercial success in his Redmond years - so far at least - has been the system he developed for handling laundry, room service, banquets and trash collection in hotels.

After testing his ideas in Westin hotels and publishing his 1998 book, "The New Back-of-the-House: Running the Smart Hotel," Propst created a company to market the products: Bellevue-based Hostar International.

Claudia Propst Berg, one of his four children, is president.Customers include more than 92 hotels around the world.

Information from Newhouse News Service is included in this report. Keith Ervin's phone: 206-515-5632. E-mail: kervin@seattletimes.com