Agile Otter Blog

Let's talk about flying. Airplanes are incredibly cool machines. Heavier-than-air, faster than cars, all thrust and lift and control and high tech. Most have massive jet engines on the wings and/or tail. They are hotrods THAT FLY. It's cooler than that if you let yourself think about it. You're 35,000 feet in the air, moving at 500 miles per hour, looking at the tops of the clouds. THE TOPS OF THE CLOUDS! When I was a kid, we liked to park near an airport and watch the planes take off and land. Yeah, we didn't have video games or cable back then. It was cool, and the closer you could get to the end of the airstrip, the better. At night, you could watch the lights zooming over your head and feel the thunder. It really is amazing. So let's talk about airports. The old grass strip airports used to be places of wonder and amazement, and plane fans would spend spare time showing up and looking around and maybe having a cup of joe with the operators or pilots. T...

I was talking with some folks in California last week about the evolution of cubicles from the original "action office" where everything was movable to the modern view of cubicles as tiny jails with fixed walls held firmly in place by management policy and departmental will. Originally, the office was supposed to adapt to the needs of the people living/working in it, but then something sad happened: Propst believed that the facility should adapt to the needs of the individuals, and there could be many forms of adaptation. But in the 1980s and 1990s, standards programs and the box move—move people instead of the office—became the predominant planning model. Workers had to adapt to the facility. What happened to a human-focused, individual-focused interior design approach? This is not an unfamiliar story. I think it has some parallels with other great movements of the past few decades in that some mechanical aspect of the original work is kept, but only after the humani...