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:This article is about traditional meanings of the word office. For the computer office applications suite, see Microsoft Office.An office is a room or other area in which people work, but may also denote a position within an organisation with specific duties attached to it (see officer, office-holder, official); the latter is in fact an earlier usage, office as place originally referring to the location of one's duty. When used as an adjective, the term office may refer to business-related tasks.
An office is an architectural and design phenomenon and a social phenomenon, whether it is a tiny office such as a bench in the corner of a "Mom and Pop shop" of extremely small size (see SOHO) through entire floors of buildings up to and including massive buildings dedicated entirely to one company. In modern terms an office usually refers to the location where white-collar workers are employed during the day.
1 History of offices
Offices in classical antiquity where often part of a palace complex or a large temple. There was usually a room where scrolls were kept and scribes did their work. Ancient texts mentioning the work of scribes allude to the existence of such "offices". These rooms are sometimes called "libraries" by some archaeologists and the general press because one often associates scrolls with literature. In fact they were true offices since the scrolls were meant for record keeping and other management functions such as treaties and edicts, and not for writing or keeping poetry or other works of fiction.
Pre-industrial illustrations such as paintings or tapestries often show us personalities or eponyms in their private offices, handling record keeping books or writing on scrolls of parchment. All kinds of writings seemed to be mixed in these early forms of offices. Before the invention of the printing press and its distribution there was often a very thin line between a private office and a private libraryAlternative meanings: Library (computer science), Library (biology In its traditional sense, a library is a collection of books. It can refer to an individual's private collection, but more often, it is a large collection that is funded and maintained by since books were read or written in the same space at the same deskA desk is a furniture form and a class of table. It is often used in a work or office setting to read or write on, using simple implements like a pencil and paper or complicated ones like a computer. Desks often have one or more drawers. The List of desk or table, and general accounting and personal or private letters were also done there.
The medieval chanceryOne of the courts of equity in England and Wales. The High Court of Chancery was the court that developed from the Lord Chancellor's jurisdiction. Unlike the common law courts, which were rigidly based on precedent, the Lord Chancellor had jurisdiction to was usually the place where most government letters were written and were laws were copied in the administration of a kingdom. The rooms of the chancery often had walls full of pigeonholes, constructed to hold rolled up pieces of parchment for safekeeping or ready reference (a precursor to the book shelf). The introduction of printing during the RenaissanceLeonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, an example of the blend of art and science during the Renaissance The Renaissance was a great cultural movement which brought about a period of scientific revolution and artistic transformation, at the dawn of modern Eur did not change these early government offices much.
2 Space arrangement in offices
There are many different ways of arranging the space in an office and whilst these vary according to function, managerial fashionA fashion consists of a current (constantly changing) trend, favoured for frivolous rather than practical, logical, or intellectual reasons. Fields prone to fashions Fashions are social psychology phenomena common to many fields of human activity and thins and the culture of specific companies can be even more important. Choices include, how many people will work within the same room. At one extreme, each individual worker will have their own room; at the other extreme a large open plan office can be made up of one main room with tens or hundreds of people working in the same space. Open plan offices which put multiple workers together in the same space and some studies in particular areas have shown that they give short term productivity, for example within a single software project. At the same time the loss of privacy and security can increase the incidence of theft and loss of company secrets. A type of compromise between open plan and individual rooms is provided by the cubicleA cubicle desk forms an integral whole with the five or six foot high partitions that separate it from the neighbors. There are usually no standalone supports for the main work surfaces, or the shelves around them. Everything is connected to the wall-like, possibly made most famous by the DilbertDilbert is a popular American comic strip. Written by Scott Adams, the comic is known for its heavily satirical humor about a micromanaged office, featuring a software engineer as the title character and his clueless boss. The strip has run in newspapers cartoon series, which solves visual privacy to some extent, but often fails on acoustic separation and security.
