Work _____: Kicking Cubicles to the Curb

Picture yourself in a gray cubicle, surrounded by a dozen others, on the fourth floor of a suburban office building large enough to have its own postal code. See the little ridges of dust behind your aging computer monitor? See the worn spot on your mousepad where your wrist has rubbed the color off? Below the desk, just behind the trash can (which is the changing-est thing in the cube, by simple virtue of its being emptied every night), there’s a sticky note with some numbers on it. It came to rest there two months ago.

Maybe you had to close your eyes to see this picture, or maybe you’re actually sitting in it. Either way, it’s one description of the daily working environment for millions of people. Thankfully, it’s also disappearing.

More people are working from home. According to the 2005 Federal Survey of Income and Participation, 11 million Americans worked from home at least one day a week. If you include home-based businesses and self-employed workers, you could add another 10 to 15 million people to the total. And more of us are working in non-traditional spaces. Thanks to simple, affordable, internet-based communication tools, working from coffee shops, co-working locations, community-organized ‘labs’ and hacker-spaces have become viable options. And all this is bleeding back into traditional work environments, where healthier, better-designed workspaces are becoming the trend.

A new picture of the way we work is emerging, and we think it’s one everybody should be getting excited about. 

This month on Curbly, we’ll explore the places where creative people thrive. We’ll bring you fresh inspiration for your home office in the form of our  “Desk-a-Day” feature. Chris will show you his own DIY transition to being a full-time work-at-home-er. I’ll take you on a series of amazing photo tours of creative people’s studios, craft rooms, and workshops. And we’ll top it off with a bunch of round-ups covering offices accessories, chairs, organization and more. 

The modern workplace is a broad topic, touching different aspects of everyone life; we’ll try to focus on the ‘place’ part of it. Curbly’s motto is ‘Love Where You Live’, so what happens when you start mixing where you live and where you work? 

Help us get inspired to ‘Love Where You Work’. Send us your suggestions, photos, and stories about the best (or worst) places to be creative. Got a great studio, home-office, or workshop? Get in touch and send us some pictures! Need some help getting your creative space set up perfectly? Leave a question in the comments, post it in the Q&A forum, or send us an e-mail about it.