An extension of the eat-your-own-dogfood metaphor?

Snarky: I’ve asked them to turn the cubes 90 degrees in case it increases productivity.
Title: An extension of the eat-your-own-dogfood metaphor?

Eating Your Own Dogfood:
"The editor of IEEE Software recounts that in the 1970s television advertisements for Alpo dog food, Lorne Greene pointed out that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another possible origin is the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders' meetings.

In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled "Eating our own Dogfood", challenging him to increase internal usage of the company's product. From there, the usage of the term spread through the company"

Dogs align their bodies along a North-South axis when they poop:
"Ever wonder why dogs need to get themselves into just the right position to do their business? As it turns out, dogs align their body axis according to Earth's magnetic field when they squat to poop—a behavior that changes when the magnetic field is unstable. But why do they do it?"

If you're architecting the boxes and not the lines it does.

Unfamiliar with emergent architecture?  InfoQ has a whole section of articles, although they're a bit hit or miss.  Gartner lists seven properties of Emergent Architecture (below).  I like the part where it stresses that it revolves around individuals acting in their own interests.  "Scarcity of resources" as a driver of EA resonates with me, as some of the best architecture decisions I've been involved with resulted from desperately trying to reduce a h/w or resource cost, sometimes to 5% of the original projection.

Abel Avram has a very good response article that highlights several EA lists and includes a quote by Bruce Robertson of Gartner, "architect the lines, not the boxes’, which means managing the connections between different parts of the business rather than the actual parts of the business themselves."

If you work for a large enterprise, there's a good paper from the scalingsoftwareagilityblog on the principles of agile architecture [pdf].

Gartner's Characteristics of Emergent Architecture:

1. Non-deterministic - In the past, enterprise architects applied centralised decision-making to design outcomes. Using emergent architecture, they instead must decentralise decision-making to enable innovation.
2. Autonomous actors - Enterprise architects can no longer control all aspects of architecture as they once did. They must now recognise the broader business ecosystem and devolve control to constituents.
3. Rule-bound actors - Where in the past enterprise architects provided detailed design specifications for all aspects of the EA, they must now define a minimal set of rules and enable choice.
4. Goal-oriented actors - Previously, the only goals that mattered were the corporate goals but this has now shifted to each constituent acting in their own best interests.
5. Local Influences: Actors are influenced by local interactions and limited information. Feedback within their sphere of communication alters the behaviour of individuals. No individual actor has data about all of an emergent system. EA must increasingly coordinate.
6. Dynamic or Adaptive Systems: The system (the individual actors as well as the environment) changes over time. EA must design emergent systems sense and respond to changes in their environment.
7. Resource-Constrained Environment: An environment of abundance does not enable emergence; rather, the scarcity of resources drives emergence.

Snarky: Does emergent architecture always result in a cube?
Title: If you're architecting the boxes and not the lines it does.

It’s not lost hope and shattered dreams?

I have seen what lies beneath the edges of cube walls.  The dust and dirt and skin and paper and ink and nastiness of everyone who has sat there or walked past since the last changes to developer layout intended to ensure optimal efficiency.  There was a time when rows and columns of desks were considered the best environment to type.  Cubes were introduced as a way to put humanity back into the system and offer workers their own space.

Robert Propst, a designer for Herman Miller Research Corporation, wanted to liberate secretaries from that hell. In Europe, office designers promoted the idea of Bürolandschaft, or “office landscape” — privacy screens and office plants — and Propst borrowed it

Since then, they've come to be associated with large enterprise office work (although smaller companies can be equally cubicular) and the drudge that can go with working in a place that can be dehumanizing by sheer size.  And then we went open space.  Which in some respects can look suspiciously like those first secretarial pool layouts.  And then we try to strike a middle ground.  Open space, bordered by enough walls to make a team feel separate.  That one is still up in the air, although I like it, having worked in a similar environment when I was first a contractor.  The only downside was a coworker in my bounded space flipping a bowl of fried rice into my floppy drive.  Fortunately, floppies are yesterday's news and you get to spend half a day relaxing if your computer is full of rice and a bit of sweet and sour sauce.

Title: It’s not lost hope and shattered dreams?
Snarky: My life was better before I saw what collected under the edges of cube walls.