Without offices or cubicles or opaque conference rooms to cry in, what’s an abused worker to do? Well aware of the “popularity” of crying at work, companies and co-working spaces have commissioned designers to fix it. [4] That is, they have contorted a labor issue into a spatial one. Rather than a return to privacy, the solution has been found in repurposing the “distraction strip” — the building code requirement to mark glass walls so people don’t walk into them. [5] Logos had once been a popular choice but don’t obscure tears, while vertical stripes still reveal too much, and floor-to-ceiling frost conceals too wide a range of behaviors. Which leaves us with the horizontal stripe, preferably calibrated to span from table height to eye height of passersby. A view of legs and feet are unlikely to betray a wanton sob, and the sorts of meltdowns that involve arm flailing and stomping are considered inappropriate office behavior, so offices are not designed to indulge them.

This is where the design problem betrays itself. The design discloses the acceptable: silent tears are inevitable, distress larger than the distraction strip is inadmissible. [6] Rather than create office environments where people are less inclined to cry, crying at work has become a foregone conclusion — it is okay because it is obscured. Just as the open office masks surveillance with an aesthetic of transparency, this design “solution” masks the normalization of our emotional wreckage.