It's an interactive unit, ... this flower that sort of perks up. We wanted to look at a cube and get a sense of welcome instead of 'Oh, my God, it's another day.'

The whole thing, ... has been about getting the right balance between who is Dilbert and who is the user. We didn't get rid of the walls because the walls are real for Dilbert.

And suddenly, we knew we had to have cubicles, ... So we built them. We brought a cube farm right into the middle of our open space. We've been working in them for two months, basically, to get the insight into what it's like. It's pretty funny.

[In other words, they observed Dilbert and Dogbert, The Boss and Catbert, all moving around in the memo-maze of comic-strip cubicles that make up his beige and barren world.] In the end, ... when you see the final product, the solution is very specific to the problems we saw. We wanted to know how to make the cube more homey, more lie what those characters want.

[For one thing, the man of the hour is a cartoon.] We tend to work very closely with our clients, ... People say one thing -- like, 'Oh, I always go over here when I'm doing this task' -- and then they do exactly the opposite thing. So for our projects, we do a lot of observational research. We even take them out on the research with us.

When you're building a new space, the client has to own it. So we are at our best when we're teaching our clients how to be their own design advocates.