It is perhaps the most common misconception of evolutionary theory that all animals are somehow evolving towards something perfect. This notion is perhaps best summed up when a sceptic asks: “If we have evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” The lesser of the two problems with this is its solipsistic assumption that humans are the pinnacles of life and that, if evolution were true, all species would eventually evolve into people. The bigger (and related) issue is that the question overlooks the fact that each species is already pretty much perfectly adapted to whatever environmental niche it inhabits at any particular time. It is only when that niche changes that the organism has to adapt to its changing surroundings and conditions, which is why many species continue to thrive almost unchanged over thousands or even millions of years. They have no need to evolve into a human or anything else.
This is the reason there is so much diversity of life on Earth. Yet, precisely because we’re humans we prefer this level of complexity and uncertainty to be simplified into patterns and narrative concepts such as the tree of life and the Ascent of Man.
A similar process can be discerned in the way we talk about the evolution of workplace design. I won’t pick on any particular one of the numerous histories of office design you can find online but any you care to look up is likely to begin with the starched clerical workers in Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the Larkin Building from 1903 and wind up with a millennial on an orange slide. Along the way it will stop to have a pop at Frederick Taylor, cubicles and open plan before suggesting that something or other is dead and needs to be replaced because the pinnacle of office design has been achieved and you need to ascend too.
This idea is a compelling trap and it is one that Juriaan van Meel swerves neatly in his book Workplaces Today by treating the workplace ecosystem as something that can be subject to the same principles of taxonomy as the natural world.
Of course, he’s not the first person to turn to classification as a way of challenging the idea of an evolution procession towards a universally idealised form of office design. He doesn’t avoid the history of the office and the fact that it remains in a perpetual state of flux as it adapts to the changing needs of organisations, technology and people.