Building a Cube Farm that Sucks Less?

cubiclist asks: "It has been decreed that our company is moving from private offices to cubicles. We all know that Peopleware has hard data to warn us away from this, but it cannot be helped at this point. Now that we know that we are going into cubes, what can we do to make it suck less? In research on the web, I cannot find any advice on office layouts for developers in cubes. I have found some threads on improving cube interiors from places like ThinkGeek and Ikea, but I am really interested on some best practices for the overall layout of the floor.

"In our office, developers are all intermediate to senior. They have a good knowledge of the software package they are working on as well as the business that they are serving.

In this environment, people can generally work for a day or two without having to ask questions. If questions arise, people don't mind walking over to the right person. The cube vendors' breezy assertion that we'll boost productivity by being able to shriek out questions, and overhear conversations (naturally they'll all be related to what we're working on) doesn't seem to fit our work flows.

My guess is that we're basically going to want to retrofit our existing work patterns into a sub-optimal cube environment. We can design in some workrooms with full walls and doors that shut.

Here's what I'm thinking at the moment: Cubes should be quiet, quiet, quiet! Meetings, pair-programming, collaboration or highly hairy coding should be restricted to workrooms, which would be set up with a CPU to Remote Desktop (WinXP) back to the developer's primary development machine.

But this is just what I've dreamt up on my own. Has anyone experimented with this setup? If so, how often do you need to get out of your cube and shut yourself in a room? Is it useful to have white noise piped in, or is it better to have an oppressive rule of silence imposed on everyone?

Many thanks."