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1.02.09

Designing Chaos

An old, but still absorbing story about the TBWA Chiat/Day advertising agency which former boss Jay Chiat completly redesigned, but failed. From the Wired-article from 1999:

Before long, there was a beeline for the only vestiges of a conventional workplace - the enclosed “project rooms.” In LA and, later, in the New York virtual office, these rooms had been designated for clients, or agency groups working for a particular client. But in the frantic attempts to escape from open space, nobody much cared who they were designated for. “The rooms would quickly fill up with people,” says freelance copywriter Paul Spencer, “and then they’d say to everyone else, ‘Get out - this is mine!

It was a high crime to leave any stuff in the project rooms, or on the tables out on the open floor, or anywhere. But since the lockers were too small to hold much more than personal mementos, people began to lug armfuls of stuff - important papers, contracts, storyboards - as they slogged through the space. (Monika Miller, at least, still had her wagon; who was laughing now?) People started hiding their stuff in corners. And then they’d forget where they’d hidden it. “Every day,” says Miller, “there’d be these frantic email messages like, ‘Has anybody seen my binder? Does anyone know where my files are?

They’d dart in at six in the morning, grab equipment, hide it somewhere, and maybe catch a couple more hours’ sleep before the virtual workday began. This didn’t sit well with Rabosky and others: “Damned if I was going to get up at six in the morning to get a phone,” he says. “I had to put my foot down. I told my assistant, ‘Go in there at six in the morning, get me a phone and computer, and hide it till I get there.

Creative directors couldn’t find their copywriters. Calls to portable phones were answered by voicemail; by the time the calls were returned, the original inspiration had passed. Even if people were in the office, “the simple processes of finding a human being were gone,” Cooke says. “Where would an art director be? One wouldn’t know. I can remember coming back from a presentation and being unable to find my creative department for two days.

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