Just as the heart of Generation X is turning 40 years old, guess what else just celebrated its 40th birthday? The office cubicle! Or as Douglas Coupland coined the term, “veal fattening pens.” The cubicle was designed by the late Robert Propst at the furniture design company Herman Miller, which launched it as the “Action Office” in July 1968.
Of course, the office cubicle has inspired an entire genre of humor, from Dilbert to Office Space.
But leave it to a Gen Xer to bring a contemporary design sensibility to the cubicle, as Fred Dust of IDEO did back in 2001. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, approached IDEO, a San Francisco-based design firm, to rethink the cubicle. The result sounds very Gen X and already a little dated! As the press release of the time states:
The result is a modular cubicle that allows each worker to select the components from a “kit of parts” and create a space based on his or her tastes and lifestyle. Practical considerations include modules for seats, computers, displays, and lights; more whimsical modules provide a hammock, an aquarium, and a hamster wheel.
Interestingly, Herman Miller just came out with a new line of “office” furniture that is designed for the home office — which is precisely where a lot of us are working these days, as I point out in my book Slackonomics.
So every now and then I check links to this website, and I saw a blog post written by Suzy who is actually a member of Gen Y (or the Millennials) but seems to have a very Xer-ish attitude, right down to blogging about how she’s trying to live within a budget: “This budget blog chronicles my valiant attempts to make a living off my writing and stay in the black…” Who knows how she heard about my book and website, but she read the INTRO online and liked what she read, and contributed her own analysis:
For instance – take social security (note: this is my own example, not Chamberlain’s). Scottrade Investing just completed a survey that noted that although 87% of Gen X’ers believe they deserve social security benefits from the government, most aren’t counting on actually getting any benefits. Other highlights from the survey:
43% believe they won’t be able to retire fully
26% aren’t sure they’ll ever be able to leave the workforce
37% predict they’ll need $1 million to retire
40% haven’t hit the $25 thousand mark yet
40% are saving more as a result of their insecurity over social securityI think those stats exemplify Chamberlain’s definition of creative destruction – because of all of the financial insecurity (first four bullets), Generation X will be forced to create a new economic reality for themselves (last bullet). Right now, they are just saving more, but will there be a reinvention of how we save for retirement, or protest that results in genuine change to the entire social security infrastructure.
I’m definitely encouraged by the fact that Millennials are relating to the book (’Millennials’ seems like a much better term than Gen Y, which is only in reaction to Generation X — the same way we hated “boomerangers” and the like — but I digress). The fact is, a lot of the forces that came about when Gen X was coming of age are still very much in play. So, for instance, people like Rachel Balik, a Millennial reviewer for a website called PopMatters, liked the book for many of the same reasons that Suzy is relating to it as well. That is definitely a happy surprise…
We kind of knew even before the house was finished that it was too much house for us,” –Stan Cheslock, 60-something financial investor
What can I say about this 26,000 square foot house in Greenwich, CT other than it disgusts me? One upside of the stock market meltdown is that poor Mr. Cheslock lost a fortune. Boo-hoo. Unfortunately, the damage from wasted energy and resources going into building this house — and the “normal” sized McMansions across the country — is already done. (Median square feet of floor area for new privately owned, single-family homes jumped from 1,560 in 1974 to 2,248 in 2006. The typical McMansion is 3,000 square feet or larger.)
I’ll just quote a few lines from Slackonomics about the changing housing preferences from Boomers to Generation X, which almost every housing developer has ignored for the last 10+ years. “… according to market research conducted by Reach Advisors, a Boston-based marketing firm, even Xers who prefer single-family houses [as opposed to condos or apartment in urban areas] want smaller homes built closer together with amenities that foster interaction with their neighbors, such as dog parks and walking trails. Ever the practical generation, wealthy Xers, too, prefer quality over quantity, and are less concerned than older generations with what a house says about one’s status.”
Today’s Times has 10 short essays about how to deal with $4 gas (here in LA I’ve seen $5+ per gallon — talk about a place with inelastic demand). One of the more interesting pieces is from my friend Tom Vanderbilt who has a book coming out titled, “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do.” His solution? In a nutshell, Slackonomics, i.e. use less fuel by slowing down. Various methods have proven effective, such as real-time fuel consumption information (as the Prius provides), traffic circles that slow people down, and others. The salient point, however, is this: “An Australian study found that ‘aggressively’ driven vehicles saved a mere five minutes over a 94-minute course compared to a ’smoothly’ driven vehicle — but the smooth car used 30 percent less fuel.” Keep in mind, I’m not arguing we can save the world by becoming lay-about stoners. Au contraire. I’m a pretty aggressive New Yorker myself. But the premise of Slackonomics is that economic circumstances may very well point the way towards finding a little bit of peace and happiness in our everyday lives — in this case, an attempt to reduce gas consumption forces us to be a little less aggressive and a little more magnanimous with our fellow travelers (be they drivers, cyclists or pedestrians).
UPDATE: Tom writes in with this, “I certainly hadn’t thought of it that way, but it makes sense! Slower speeds are good for your health too, of course, not just blood pressure but crash risk.”
I concluded a recent post with this: “I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that the new economy and the old safety net system are seriously out of whack. Pensions, Medicare and Social Security? Please.”
In the Times Sunday Magazine, Dalton Conley addresses this very issue with an interesting thought: forget a New New Deal, reimagine the “social contract along the lines of a computer network or the bug-and-spoke airline network.” He provides a number of examples of how this might work, such as the how the “feds could mandate that any institutions of higher education that receive government dollars must make their research and course materials available online in an open-source format free of charge.” That’s just one of many intriguing ideas he throws out there for Obama to chew on.