Flatpack logic doesn’t end at furniture. It arrives at the job centre, where people are processed with the same principles of portability, interchangeability, and efficiency. Strawboard walls rise like oversized packaging, holding human potential in neat compartments. Here, identity is not explored. It is flattened into a role. Surfaces speak the language of readiness. Laminated clipboards list pre-sorted skills. Lanyards wrap around necks like shipping labels. The architecture is not neutral. It is optimized. Waiting rooms resemble intake bays. Movements are sequenced. Nothing invites reflection. Everything directs. Under fluorescent light, aspiration becomes inventory. People are slotted into categories before they speak. The system asks not who you are, but where you fit. Emotion is trimmed from the process. There is no room for the erratic, the uncertain, the unclassifiable. The logic is modular. If one part breaks, another slides into place. Even the material tells the story. Compressed strawboard suggests environmental care, but signals disposability. It is a surface that ages poorly, replaced rather than repaired. It mirrors a labour system that values short-term utility over long-term growth. The same fibres reappear in shuttle buses and ID tags, the metaphor travels with the worker. This is not employment. It is deployment. You arrive packaged and leave positioned. To reimagine these spaces means rejecting the logic of shipment and instead designing for agency. A job centre should not flatten people. It should unfold them. When labour is reduced to a component, work becomes meaningless. But when space honors identity, possibility begins. - Based on David Graeber Bullshit Jobs.