As one of the foremost thinkers and writers about workplace design, tell us, what’s wrong with the modern office?

For one thing, it’s not modern. It’s 100 years old, in its format, its processes, and it’s being overtaken by spectacular advances in information technology. What’s going on at the moment is like the Industrial Revolution. Information technology is going to change absolutely everything about our way of life, our cities, our structures. It’s happening in front of our very eyes, and, particularly in North America, we’ve got a form of office design that was novel 30 or 40 years ago but is quickly becoming outmoded.

You call the cubicle “a symbol and a symptom of bureaucratic breakdown.”

In this new world, the office is not

about people doing separate work in separate boxes. It’s about interacting with other people, about talking and working collaboratively. And a conventional office is terrible at encouraging interaction. Except by accident, when you overhear someone in the next cubicle going on about something you don’t want to hear.

What needs to happen to offices to keep up with this sweeping change?

There has to be a deliberate attempt by organizations to invent a new kind of work culture. In the work we’re doing, one of main features is to increase the proportion of space that’s collective as opposed to individual. Places where you meet and talk and do project work.

In what ways did traditional office design make sense in the old context?

If you don’t mind a bit of social history, it was a direct product of Frederick Taylor’s concept of scientific management — Taylorism — the basic ideal of which was to break work down into the simplest components and take away the initiative from the individual worker. Henry Ford learned everything he knew from Taylor. It’s about treating people as units of production, and that’s what the iconography of the so-called modern office is all about. That made America rich in the 20th century, but we’ve come to the end of that era. It’s over.