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.

Written By JOSEPH FLAHERTY

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Is collaborative office design hurting workplace productivity?

The trendy theory in office design is that open, cubicle-less workspaces foster a creative, collaborative workplace. One survey found that 77 percent of respondents have or are planning to implement an open-office design. But what is this office design doing to productivity?

In a new survey from Gensler, the global design and architecture firm found that some offices are going too far with the open concept and it’s hurting productivity, with only one in four knowledge workers in the United States working in optimal workplace environments.

What exactly is the optimal design? In analyzing the survey, Gensler determined that the optimal workplace, while focusing on collaboration with an open design, also balances openness with spaces that help workers focus.

Written By Tyler Falk

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