How do i use tact to stay on in my current office room even though it has been given to someone else?

I am a grad student. We(5 of us) used to have a really good office room that was airy and well lighted. Recently the dept asked me to move into a horrible little mini room underground which is really smaller than a prison cell. these are private but so so small that one can hardly breathe in them, probably 5.5ft by 5.5ft at most. the dept has a serious space crunch, i admit that. but dont you think that if i am clever enough and play my pieces well, i could come off with substantially lighter "punishment". what do you think i could do?

It would probably depend on whether you can convince them that the "prison cells" would be better suited to another purpose. For example, I could argue that the small rooms would be ideal for running subjects for experiments and that the larger room would be better suited as an office. Of course, your program of study may not include human subjects, so that reason wouldn't work, but maybe there's something else. Buddy up to the faculty member with the most clout when it comes to distributing office space to see if there is another space you could use.

Ultimately, if they're insistent on dividing the space up that way, you're probably screwed. Our department recently had a whole new building built, and one lab strongly preferred their old lab space to where they were supposed to be moving. They were overruled, and the old space is still sitting vacant (though we have some new faculty hires that will move in this fall).