Pleb Lab is moving into a new boiler room, a subterranean rectangle in downtown Austin, now that our sweetheart sublease in Unchained's Littlefield Building office is over.

This is the smallest office space we've occupied and even our larger offices had desk-renters complaining about distractions. I think open offices are a plague - a reaction to cubicle culture, great in theory but frustrating in practice. Further, a friend of ours in Ireland described how their coworking space switched from a dead, open office to 80/20 private/open offices and grew to have a waiting list.

People want privacy, somewhere the world can melt away a bit, where they can make mental and physical messes, and get away from the messes of others. They don't want complete privacy, but they are more comfortable with some. Especially in a co-working space where the work/tasks are heterogenous.

When I bring this up to my fellow coworking-ers, which I've done for years, it's met with derision. "Division is depressing," they say, simultaneously perplexed by a mostly empty office that's best suited to shouting matches and holiday parties. But I'm also not recommending full, cubicle style division. I'm recommending partial division, some division, any division.

So instead of packing my office today, I've been looking for cheap, temporary ways to divide a big, open room. I started by looking at cheap store bought room dividers, which are better than nothing but ugly, then started to wonder about other options.

One of my favorites is this modular cardboard wall system that you can buy in kits:

If we're willing to go more DIY, and want better acoustic dampening, we can make walls by fastening cheap carpet tiles together:

We could also upcycle wooden pallets into walls:

I need to start packing, and I'm sure once we move the office will arrange itself haphazardly for the fourth time and people will plop into desks and spaces where they are less than comfortable, and the cycle of shouting matches and i can't get any work done here waaaaaaa will continue, but I'm at least satisfied knowing that it doesn't have to be that way.