Our newest reporter, Sarah Bzdega, writes this week about a trend toward improving or eliminating cubicles. I would say that idea is worth a shot. In my experience, you want an office arrangement that provides just the right amount of stimulation and human interaction, and although that amount is a lot less than you get from a street riot, it is definitely more than you find in a gray cubicle with no windows.

So what’s the ideal office setup? I once worked at the Marshalltown Times-Republican in a two-man sports department separated from the newsroom by a wall with a big window, and that wasn’t bad.

The editors and news reporters didn’t have to listen to us taking game results from the Green Mountain softball coach, and we had our own little world where we could engage in deep philosophical debates about journalism, like what number to write on our mileage forms for a trip to Grundy Center. We even had an easy chair, where the photographer would take late-afternoon naps while we decorated him with small bits of paper.

Another company poured us all into a wide-open sea of desks, which also had its pleasant aspects. For example, for several years I sat back-to-back with a guy who devoted most of each day to entertaining me, even though it wasn’t in his job description. It was good for our supervisor, too. We sat directly in his line of sight, so imagine the happy hours he spent thinking of ways to drive the two of us into some other line of work.

Cubicles, however, have always felt like an insult. For one thing, it seems kind of pointless to get dressed up, drive to work and then sit in a box all by yourself. Pants cost a lot of money, you know. And some of those boxes are so small that you might as well spend the workday out in the parking lot in your car.

We allowed this to happen without a fight, and now we’re stuck with it. According to an organization called InformeDesign, “more than 40 million North Americans spend their working lives in cubicles.” And, by the way, “there is abundant evidence that cubicle dwellers are not generally satisfied with this environment.”

Do hardhearted employers care? Maybe they should.

One professor of industrial design and psychology says the best visual cues for sparking creativity and productivity are objects and patterns that mimic nature. Mother Nature wired you to spend your life gazing at lakes and forests; you’re spending it staring into the corner of a cubicle. No wonder your once-mighty thought process has been reduced to a low buzzing noise.

So tearing down the fabric-covered walls probably is the answer, but first we should check to see how things are going with the “attentive office cubicle” concept developed in Canada a couple of years ago.

The walls are made of a material that’s usually opaque, but becomes transparent when overhead cameras determine that adjoining cubicle dwellers have become “potential communication partners.” (Meaning that one of them is staring in the other’s direction, and the second person appears to be alive and possibly awake.)

A much better feature is that people in attentive cubicles wear noise-canceling headphones. These devices block out your fellow employees’ distracting chatter and mournful wails of agony, but when colleagues approach, the noise-cancellation function turns off so the wearer can listen to them complain.

And unless this item I found was a hoax, those same headphones can perform Google searches for key phrases from the conversation. This would be an amazing, life-transforming leap forward.

On the other hand, you’d still be sitting in a cubicle.