"The way most problems are handled in buildings once they're opened [includes] solutions which are inelegant, incomplete, impermanent, inexpensive, just barely good enough to work."
Becker and Steele, 1995

Innovation in office design has both been a response to and has brought about organizational transformation since the turn of the century.  First, open office spaces were designed by architects as a response to organizational structure that isolated people in offices and cut down communication.  Later, modular work furniture and movable partitions, which worked best in open spaces became standard for modern office complexes--and much of the design of offices shifted from architecture to furniture design.  More recently, the focus has shifted to technical systems design as information technology has proliferated, along with the necessary cables and wires.  But buildings and the people that plan and inhabit them have over adapted to change and transient ideas with partial, single-focus "solutions," inviting colossal mistakes.  Solutions to individual problems lead to bigger and bigger problems--sealed office buildings becoming "sick" office buildings--saving energy resources and costing in human resources. Efficient solutions became a problem as it was discovered that only technically-trained experts could cope with even minor failures.

For the knowledge worker inhabitants of these "transformed" spaces, impersonalization, difficulty of getting maintenance accomplished, and inefficiencies in use patterns dominated their relationship with their environment, decreasing productivity, creativity, and job satisfaction. Now there has been a partial retreat--back to more private spaces, more variation, more available real communication--the "cave and commons" approach.  Adaptation is coming along as a method to cope. A premium is being put on spaces that can adapt and endure.

Most organizations face formidable blocks to designing functional, aesthetically pleasing, healthy, enduring environments.  Chief among the barriers that prevent good design are:

• Failure to consider all of the effected values, work styles, and process requirements
• Tendency to relate "results" with tangible things, when sometimes process can be the most important product
• Jumping to solutions for space problems without an adequate disgnosis--not following the entire creative process and not involving a broad enough constituency--letting it become a procurement problem rather than one of cultural change

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