đŸ§© Fly on the Wall – Rethinking Office Design Through Historical Patterns

📍 Project Overview

Fly on the Wall is a research-based design exploration that investigates the history of office environments to understand how physical spaces both reflect and shape cultural values. Through a critical review of office typologies—from 19th-century rows of desks to 21st-century open plans—the project challenges the myth of the “universal workspace” and advocates for more equitable, multimodal, and human-centered environments.

  • Role: Researcher, Analyst, Visual Synthesizer
  • Duration: 2 weeks
  • Tools Used: Historical Analysis, Systems Thinking, Visual Mapping, Spatial Critique
  • Focus: Environmental Design, Workplace Culture, Design History

❓ The Problem

Despite decades of innovation in workplace design, the default office layout still often prioritizes cost-saving and surveillance over employee well-being and productivity. This project began with a question:

How did we arrive at a workplace model that claims to foster collaboration—but so often undermines focus, privacy, and equity?

📜 Approach & Research

I conducted a comparative historical study of major office design movements, identifying their defining characteristics, intentions, and unintended consequences. Key phases included:

  • Factory-Era Offices: Uniform rows, productivity-first layouts
  • Johnson Wax & BĂŒrolandschaft: Early ergonomic and egalitarian designs
  • Action Office: A revolutionary human-centered model later diluted into cost-cutting cubicles
  • Open Plan Offices: Rebranded transparency, often at the cost of acoustic privacy and focus
  • Activity-Based Workspaces: A hopeful shift toward multimodal, flexible design—though inconsistently applied

Each phase was visualized and annotated to reveal both cultural values and organizational hierarchies embedded in spatial design.

🔍 Key Insights

  • Designs Reflect Power: Most office layouts visually encode rank (e.g., private offices for executives, cubicles for workers).
  • Open Plan ≠ Collaboration: The illusion of openness often reduces control, privacy, and acoustic comfort.
  • Noise is Undervalued: Sound privacy consistently fails to keep pace with visual design.
  • History is Cyclical: Many “modern” trends are echoes of past ideals—repackaged without the full intent.

“The best intentions in design are often lost to budget lines and bad photocopies.”

💡 Reflection & Future Directions

This project evolved into a critique of how one-size-fits-all thinking undermines truly human-centered design. Inspired by Robert Propst’s original Action Office vision, the next phase of this work would involve:

  • Contextual Inquiry with real workers in contemporary office environments
  • Participatory Co-Design of personalized spatial solutions
  • Speculative Prototyping: Build-your-own workspaces or plug-and-play feature modules

✹ Deliverables

  • Visual timeline of workplace evolution
  • Comparative analysis of office archetypes
  • Spatial critique of open plan pitfalls
  • Recommendations for flexible, inclusive alternatives

🔁 Reflections

Fly on the Wall is less about nostalgia and more about awareness—that the spaces we inhabit daily are not neutral. They carry embedded assumptions, hierarchies, and trade-offs. As designers, we must be more intentional about what we inherit—and what we rebuild.

“What if workspaces weren’t a reflection of power—but an invitation to thrive?”