He designed the Action Office for autonomy. Corporations bought it for density.
Robert Propst was born in 1921 in Colorado and began his career as a graphic artist, teacher, and sculptor.1 In 1958, Herman Miller president Hugh DePree hired him to lead the company's research division, with instructions to investigate problems outside the furniture industry and conceive solutions for them. Propst set up his operation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, more than 150 miles from the company's headquarters, deliberately avoiding the distraction of corporate meetings.
Propst concluded that the conventional office was, in his words, "a wasteland" that "saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment."2 His research drew on biology, behavioral psychology, and mathematics. In 1968, Herman Miller introduced his answer: the Action Office II, a modular system of reconfigurable panels, shelves, and work surfaces designed at 120-degree angles to give workers both privacy and peripheral awareness.3
The product was an unprecedented commercial success. Competitors rushed to copy it, and within a decade the movable panel wall became the basis of corporate office design across America. What Propst had designed as a system for autonomy was reconfigured by companies seeking to maximize occupancy density. The panels were set at ninety-degree angles. The enclosures shrank. The cubicle farm, which Propst had not intended, became the dominant image of American office life.
In 1997, Propst said publicly that "the cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity."4 He died in 2000. The Action Office system remained one of Herman Miller's best-selling products. The 1985 Worldesign Congress named it the most significant industrial design of the years 1961 to 1985.5