Office cubicle, modern alternative

The office cubicle was right about one thing

The cubicle gets a lot of abuse, most of it deserved. But the underlying idea — give each person a small enclosure — was correct. We just rebuilt it badly. Here is what comes after.

What the cubicle got right

The original 1960s cubicle concept was a response to a real workplace problem: the open bullpen of typists and clerks did not give people enough cognitive space to do focused work. The cubicle introduced partial enclosure, personalisation, and a small zone of acoustic relief. Workers got somewhere to think.

The cubicle's failure was not the idea. It was the execution. By the 1990s, real estate cost pressure had shrunk cubicles to claustrophobic boxes, partitions had grown taller than necessary, and the personalisation feature was actively discouraged. The result was a generation of office workers who associated the word "cubicle" with corporate misery, which is fair.

The open-plan swing

Much of the global tech sector skipped the cubicle phase almost entirely. The big captives and services majors of the 2000s built open-plan floors from the start, modelled on Silicon Valley aesthetics. Long benches, no partitions, lots of natural light. It looked modern. It worked, for a while, because the work itself was different: heads-down coding, fewer synchronous calls, smaller distributed teams.

That stopped being true sometime around 2018, and the pandemic finished the job. The open-plan floor we built for a quieter kind of work is now asked to host the audio traffic of a global call centre, on top of the original heads-down work. Neither task gets done well.

The booth as the modern cubicle done right

An office booth is, conceptually, the cubicle redone with everything we learned. It gives each person a small enclosure when they need one, but it is not assigned. You don't sit in it all day. You walk in, take the call, walk out, and the next person uses it. The enclosure is acoustic, not visual: the floor still feels open and bright, and the booth is what handles the moments that need to be private.

In a way it is a more elegant solution than the cubicle ever was, because it separates the two needs the cubicle tried to combine. Visual openness stays on the open floor. Acoustic privacy moves into a dedicated room. Each design solves one problem instead of compromising both.

When a booth replaces a cubicle row

Some older financial services offices and government-adjacent workplaces still have rows of half-height partitioned desks. When these get refurbished, the most common modern intervention is to remove the partitions, restore the open bench, and add a cluster of phone booths and one or two duo pods. The footprint stays the same. The acoustic performance goes up. The aesthetic moves from 1995 to current.

The hybrid-work argument

Hybrid work strengthens the booth argument and weakens the cubicle one. If only a fraction of your team is in the office on any given day, assigning each person a partitioned cubicle is a waste of real estate. Shared seating with on-demand booths makes more sense economically and matches how people actually want to use the space. The cubicle assumed your seat was yours. The booth assumes the floor is shared, and only the moment of privacy is yours.

Frequently asked questions

Read next

• Office booths — category overview
• From cubicle to booth in modern offices
• Hybrid work and the office redesign