For 30 years, the cubicle has been the office furniture industry’s favorite punching bag. It’s the visual shorthand for everything workplace design has supposedly evolved past: the gray fabric walls, the fluorescent hum, the soul-crushing sameness lampooned in the movie “Office Space” and Dilbert cartoons.

The cubicle was never meant to become what it became. If you look at Herman Miller Action Office brochures from when it was introduced in 1964, the industry’s first “systems furniture” never imagined a sea of cubicles. Even when Robert Propst followed it up with Action Office II in 1968, which introduced the modular panel system, it was never intended to be deployed the way it eventually was.

The modern workplace has a problem the cubicle was actually pretty good at solving. Cubicles created relatively quiet, relatively private places for people to work. Of course, no one wants to return to the cubicle farms of the early 1990s. But maybe the pendulum swung a little too far toward collaboration. And now it’s time for it to swing back.

In the pursuit of collaboration, organizations removed walls, lowered partitions and created office neighborhoods intended to encourage interaction. Then hybrid work arrived, and the office became even more complicated. Workers come in for meetings, social connection and collaboration, but they also have individual work to accomplish. And much of that work requires concentration.

The result is a growing demand for privacy and acoustic control — precisely the things the traditional cubicle was designed to provide.

The answer, however, is not to resurrect the old cubicle. What the workplace needs is a new version of the cubicle that is more flexible, more attractive, more technologically sophisticated and more responsive to how people actually work today. In other words, the cubicle needs a comeback, but it needs a redesign.

You can see the need for privacy in the explosion of work pods. They are everywhere. Furniture manufacturers and workplace dealers have embraced enclosed booths, acoustic pods, focus rooms and semi-private workstations because the market is demanding them. Products that provide one person — or sometimes two or four — with a defined space for focused work have become an increasingly important part of the workplace landscape.

It’s funny. We spent years trying to escape the cubicle, only to spend the last few years reinventing it.

The work pod is essentially the cubicle’s sophisticated younger sibling. It offers enclosure, acoustical separation and a sense of territoriality while avoiding many of the visual and cultural associations that made the cubicle unpopular. Some look more like hospitality furniture than office equipment. Others incorporate lighting, power, ventilation, sound-absorbing materials, height-adjustable work surfaces and integrated technology.

Alas, work pods are generally designed for shared, temporary use. Not every employee can have one. But something is needed.

The new cubicle can’t be the same as the old cubicle because the workplace today is dramatically different. And while any new cubicle design needs to address the workplace issues of today, it can’t be specified in the old way either. Cubicles became a punchline because of how they were deployed, not because of how the products were initially designed. Cost-cutting turned generous, ergonomically considered workstations into cramped, low-walled cells stacked shoulder to shoulder. The idea got a bad name because of how cheaply it was executed, not because the idea itself was wrong.

Knowledge workers today are drowning in notifications, meetings and ambient noise in a way that didn’t exist when the cubicle was invented. Employees are moving between modes of work. They may spend part of the day in a team setting, move to a lounge for an informal conversation, take a video call in a booth and then need 90 uninterrupted minutes to write, analyze, design or think.

The office needs to support all of those behaviors. An open plan can be excellent for some of them. It is terrible for others. The mistake has been treating openness as an inherently positive workplace attribute. Open does not automatically mean collaborative, and private does not automatically mean isolated. A well-designed workplace needs both.

That is where the new cubicle could become particularly valuable.

Imagine a workstation that provides a modest amount of visual and acoustic separation without becoming a fortress. Panels could be lower and lighter. Materials could be warmer and more residential. Screens could provide privacy when needed and disappear when collaboration is desired. Work surfaces could adjust to different postures. Integrated power and technology could support the modern worker. Acoustic treatments could reduce distractions without creating the visual heaviness associated with traditional systems.

Most importantly, the workstation could become part of a larger ecosystem rather than the basic building block of an entire office.

And for the office furniture industry, cubicles could help boost margins. The industry was at its healthiest when cubicles were king. It’s great to sell tables and ancillary, but it is a lot more profitable to sell systems furniture.