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'Roofing' Your Cubicle?
Alex Bischoff asks: "At work, I'm forced to suffer in my cubicle with overhead fluorescent lighting. So, I've given some thought to building a "roof" to block out that light, at which point I could use my own incandescent lighting to light the area (or perhaps an Eclipse Computer Light). Anyhow, at first I was going to just drape a sheet across the top of the cubible walls, and weigh them down somehow. But, after some thought, I'm thinking that might be too low, as the cubicle walls are only about five feet high (so would "stilts" for the sheet work?). So, has anyone built a 'cubicle roof' before? Any ideas on how to go about this?" Maybe a 'cubicle tent' would be more appropriate here? Especially for those cubicle warriors who are unusually tall.
I've never understood working on a CRT in a darkened area. At best I end up with a whitish rectangle burned into my retinas at the end of the day.
It seems like most people don't like reflections of lighting fixtures or windows (the architectural kind), or glaring fixtures in the periphery of their vision. The reflection problem is easy to solve by tilting the monitor down slightly. The peripheral vision problem is solved by shielding lights so that they shine downward instead of to the sides. I'm not sure why people buy fixtures that produce a small amount of light downwards, and a huge amount of glare to the side and even upwards, but they do (especially outdoor lights, see www.darksky.org for examples). My office got partway to a solution by buying fluorescents with side shields, but the shields still allow a lot of light through in the 0-30 degrees-from-horizontal range. A little late-night work with tape or aluminum foil will fix these.
In any case, the lights directly above a monitor are not much of a problem. Darkening or tenting an entire cubicle just to avoid side glare seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It puts the eyes into a highly dilated (i.e. poor depth of field) state, with dark adaptation taking 20-30 minutes to achieve maximum sensitivity. A few seconds of bright light will undue this adaptation. It also means tiny lights like LED's or light leaks will become glare sources themselves.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Just do like Jamie Zawinsky (guy that worked on the first netscape) did: go to your local army surplus store and buy an acre of camouflage netting to hang over you cubicle...
What I would probably do is this: You can get some garden tents (some people call them Tennesee tents, but that's probably not the technical term.) that consist of a roof (pointy in a pyramid fashion.) and four legs, about 7' high or so. The sides are open. They're probably 10' x 10' or so, and they're white, so some light would get through. A little sawing, and maybe that woud be your solution, provided that you cubicle fits the measurements.
-Bo
Back in my cubicle-inhabiting days, I was forever fighting glare on my screens. So I put theatre gel (color filters) in the fixtures right over my desk to tone down the white glare. Today, you can buy the gel in sleeves that fit right over the bulbs.
In another situation, a colleague and I removed the tubes from the fixture and used spot lighting in our cubes to achieve the same effect.
If your objection is to the color instead of the flickering, there are special tubes that are available under a number of trade names. Look for a specification that the tube has a color temperature of around 5000 degrees K, and a spectrum that mimics a sunny day at 2 PM. Use a neutral gel if the tubes give out too much light.
In my home office, I have a fixture that uses T-8 tubes instead of the more standard T-12, so I have to use what I can find for tubes. A couple of gels (#813) I had lying around from a theatre job cuts the light down to something bearable, and also cuts some blue out so that I get better contrast from my 19" monitor.
Just make sure you can do the entire bullpen...
This reminds me of a programmer dude at Electronic Arts (Canada). He extended the height of his cube walls and added a roof, all out of sheets of that "corrugated plastic" stuff. Not sure what the material is called, but it's really lightweight, cheap, easy to cut, and looks like corrugated cardboard, only it's smooth plastic.
The company was also cool enough to allow the flourescent lights to be turned completely off on many floors where the programmers and artists worked. Task lighting was the name of the game. Looked odd, kinda dungeon like, but very nice on the eyes. I had the pleasure of an outside window cube on several occasions, and almost always kept the blinds drawn, too. Geez, we had an aversion to light in that place!
Anyway, between no overhead lights and the additional fortressing, this guy's cube became known as The Cave (among other things). Naturally, it was on the tour circuit for visitors. (Reinforces that eccentric, hard-working programmer stereotype.)
Anyway, the company moved into nice, new Architecturally Correct premises after a few years and I left around the same time, so I'm not sure what became of the cave.
The dude was always a little pale looking, but mother of god, could he write code...
Try grabbing one of those patio umbrellas. Nice, variety of colors, comes apart quickly for moving/cleaning day/management objections. It's also less permanent and less imposing than most other solutions. The key here is getting buy-in from your boss.
You might also try finding an optometrist who understands that, while most people don't see the 60Hz flicker, some of us do. (Somewhere around 75Hz is where I stop seeing flicker from monitors.) Lie that you're getting headaches from the overhead flicker, and produce the note from your doctor.
The real issue here is putting non-dimmable ballasts with cool-white bulbs into an office environment. (The architect should have known better, but most American architecture tends to be wrong about most things.) If you could dim, or turn off your overhead fixtures, the company would save money on replacing bulbs, electricity, your increased morale, and your increased output.