An Office Landscape Designed to Kill Boring Meetings

Designs become icons when they embody the time in which they were created. The Eames lounge chair represented a midcentury shift to a more casual home life when many people still held “tea times” in formal living rooms. The invention of the Aeron chair in the 1990′s marked an era when a company could show that it cared about its employees by giving them the pinnacle in ergonomic seating. Today, with the launch of Herman Miller’s Public Office Landscape furniture system, Fuseproject, the design firm run by Yves Béhar, hopes to capture the spirit of our networked lives in a collection of chairs, desks, and space shaping components.

“We’re trying to reflect horizontality and creativity,” says Béhar. “Today, it’s not just the boss that gets a special chair. Because of improvements in materials and the way we approach design, everyone can have one. With the Public Office Landscape, we tried to capture this notion of collaboration and immediate access to ways of getting together.” On the surface the collection is stylish and airy, but below the polished aesthetics the system reveals a lot about what it means to be a modern office worker.

When Béhar was assigned the project it came with a broad mandate—far beyond simply developing a cubicle system or a table to match his award winning Sayl chair. He was tasked with creating “the ultimate collaborative office environment” a challenging creative brief that required the team to ask big questions about the changing nature of work.

The process started with discussions on the psychology of creativity, including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on “flow” states. Market research uncovered surprising information, like the fact that 70% of office interactions occur at a desk. The team intuitively knew that in an age of noise canceling headphones, small groups could meet in a central work area without causing a disturbance. And as designers they decided it was time to minimize the use of foam in seating — its ergonomic benefits are suspect, it’s environmental effects are negative, and it lacks style. After synthesizing their data and discussions, the Fuseproject team distilled their findings into three actionable themes.

First, was the recognition that the reason we still have offices in an age of ultralight laptops and Skype is that value is derived from collaboration. “The companies we work with are better at what they do and can work faster because people are collaborating more,” says Béhar. “Putting people into close proximity is the way to enhance that value and to foster a culture that is constantly creating it.” They seized on the notion that most interactions happen at a desk and redesigned them accordingly, creating “social pods” with spaces for visitors and an eye towards collaboration.

Second, was breaking down the outdated notion that there are only two kinds of professional space—desks and meeting rooms. Having to schedule meeting rooms weeks in advance is a flow killer—so the team turned interstitial spaces, places workers walk through and by, into distributed gathering spots. Variations in color and visual elements throughout the system give team members a change of scenery. “This notion of variety is important,” says Béhar. “When I look around in my office there are a lot of different types of places to interact. If I want to have a low voice interaction I can go into a cafe configuration, If I want to brainstorm I can go into a social pod.” The Public Office Landscape lives up to its name and transforms potential dead space into “moments of potential collaboration.”

The timing of the project was fortuitous—Fuseproject was in the midst of moving into a new 22,000 square foot office giving them the rare opportunity to continuously experiment with designs and live with the prototypes, a process that yielded additional insights. The idea of mixing meeting and workspaces wasn’t a part of the original vision, but a theme that evolved organically as the project progressed.

Finally, the system had to be flexible, in terms of how people work at their desks and the ability to pivot, literally in this case, by reorienting the office layout as needed. “We still think about furniture systems and office work in old ways,” says Béhar. “One thing I didn’t understand was why you had to buy a system for a specific layout and it only worked with that layout? Why don’t we have a system that can be used in multiple configurations? Instead of coming up with prescriptive solutions we tried to accommodate different types of behavior.” The fact that modern office workers primarily using laptops and personal cell phones also freed Fuseproject from having to deal with old design headaches, like minding Ethernet drops, freeing them up to imagine more mobile, social solutions.

The Public Office Landscape system is being displayed for the first time at NeoCon, the furniture industry’s premier tradeshow, but, according to Béhar, has been a hit at Fuseproject. “We have two formal meeting rooms in our office for client presentation, but no one wants to use them for internal meetings anymore,” he says. “Physical, enclosed meeting room have become unattractive for collaborative interaction.”

Images Courtesy: Fuseproject