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Six experts--spanning seven decades--offer up their perspectives on the future of the office.
By Paul Makovsky and Susan S. Szenasy
Illustrations by Tim Kucynda for Metropolis
November 2002
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Lise Anne Couture & Hani Rashid
Couture and Rashid are cofounders of Asymptote, a multidisciplinary
architecture and design practice based in New York. The firm recently
designed the A3 system for Knoll. |
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Bill Stumpf
A designer, author and inventor of processes, Stumpf's workplace
projects include the Ergon chair from Herman Miller and (with Don
Chadwick) the iconic Aeron chair. |
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Jens Risom
Arguably the father of Scandinavian Modern, the Copenhagen-born Risom
designed Knoll's first line of modern furniture, including the classic
Webbed chair. |
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Niels Diffrient
A designer and consultant for a number of Fortune 500 companies,
Diffrient's designs for the workplace include Humanscale's Freedom chair
and, most recently, a task light. |
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Linton Peixoto
Peixoto is a physical therapist in the outpatient clinic at New York Hospital,
in Queens. |
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We asked the best thinkers in furniture design: How is the shifting nature
of work changing the design of the office? The designers (joined by
a physical therapist) represented three generations of American humanists,
some with legendary work behind them, others with breakthrough work in front
of them. Our conversation took place in the Metropolis conference
room and went as any office meetings go these days: several players
were present (Diffrient, Risom, Rashid, Peixoto), one was on a speaker phone
from the Midwest (Stumpf), and one responded later by e-mail from Italy
(Couture). Here's the gist of what they had to say:
In the past 20 years, the workplace has changed dramatically; computers,
voicemail, e-mail, the Internet, faxes, teleconferencing. How has all this
technology changed the way we work?
STUMPF: There's no question technology has had a transforming effect. But
I think people still struggle with more basic issues. I always ask workers,
"Where do you do your most important work?" And frequently they
say, "I work at home," or "I work in hotels." Then I
ask, "What do you do at the office?" and they answer, "Well,
I have to be there." That's kind of an indictment of the modern American
office. We should look more closely at people who are masters of their work
as models for how we design new work spaces: how do they use and abuse their
tools, how do they configure space?
COUTURE: Technology has made the office more mutable, more flexible, but
there's also an important social dimension. The use of e-mail, for instance,
often means that some people rarely need to talk to each other. At the same
time there's a value placed on collaboration and shared knowledge. I think
of-fices must respond to this duality. I would also contend that the proliferation
of cell phones and other devices that allow communication to take place
"anytime and anywhere" means that we're undergoing a shift in
our sense of private and public space. Our expectation is instantaneous
communication, and an equally instantaneous reply. This is surely influencing
how we interact in the workplace and requires new thinking about how we
signal private and public space, or even private and public time.
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Dear Departed Dot-Coms
What the dot-com boom made vivid was that a significant portion of
the workforce was conventional office and wanted an alternative to the
cubicle.
--Couture
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Urbanism & The Workplace
When we began our research, we started talking about urbanism, not systems
furniture.
--Rashid
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Did we learn anything from the dot-com era about the future of the workplace?
COUTURE: What the dot-com boom made vivid was that a significant portion
of the workforce was disenchanted with the conventional office landscape
and was looking for a viable alternative to the cubicle.
RASHID: The dot-com era was really a petri dish, because it was a particular
moment when a young demographic group got to exercise its will. So we were
able to see vividly the workplace in total mutation: the breakdown of the
cube, the notion of beads as dividers, animals in the office, et cetera.
All of this translated into notions about freedom and space and lifestyle.
So the question now is, what do we take from these cultural observations?
How do we use them to make work environments healthier and more interesting?
And at the same time still deal with the monster of marketing?
RISOM: I think marketing and sales people are far too powerful. They're
the ones who in many cases put the brakes on good design--on things that
are worked out scientifically and artistically.
How has your approach to design changed?
DIFFRIENT: The one thing I'm most concerned about now is how my work affects
experience. As time goes by I find that I'm completely unable to design
something just for the looks. If as a designer I know what causes bad backs,
for example, I have a hard time ignoring those rules.
STUMPF: Everyone thinks I'm a specialist in human factors. I'm not. But
over time my approach to design has turned to an inventing of processes
and experiences that improve a situation. In other words, I try to be as
creative in setting up a human experience as I was in the early days of
refining a form.
DIFFRIENT: I have a confession to make about human factors and ergonomics.
Initially they served as levers to get difficult clients to accept designs.
Because traditionally when you show a product to a client you worry: are
they going to accept it? Most clients have no training in the field, and
you're scared to death that you're going to get rejected by an amateur.
So early on I began to see that if I showed something that represented some
accountability in the design, I could twist their arms a little bit.
Why, even though there are more ergonomically designed chairs than ever
before, are more people suffering from bad backs?
PEIXOTO: There is an interesting paradox here: better-designed office chairs
allow people to sit comfortably for longer periods of time, which instead
of solving the problem actually compounds it.
RISOM: But what kind of instruction comes with a well-designed chair? If
they don't know what they're doing, people will turn some screws, adjust
some knobs--incorrectly--and ruin their backs. They also sit the wrong way,
so the whole research-and-design process behind these chairs is wasted.
DIFFRIENT: I've given a lot of lectures on sitting comfort and always start
them by saying, "By the time I finish this talk, you'll never be comfortable
in a chair again!" Because you begin to make people aware of their
bodies. So it is possible to educate people, but they don't always want
to be educated.
STUMPF: The novelist William Gass once defined comfort as the absence of
awareness. I think the height of integration would be to get to that point.
I don't mean that in an "ignorance is bliss" sort of way, but
we all know what a good pair of shoes feels like: you don't know they're
on your feet. That's a goal that intrigues me.
PEIXOTO: I think the perfect chair would be custom-made for someone's specific
measurements.
RASHID: I'm a complete optimist on this. We already have technologies available.
Right now they're used as marketing spin, but we may get to a point where
people sit down in a factory model controlled by rules and algorithms. It
determines your perfect chair based on individual posture and tasks; and
in the end, in Jetson-like fashion, the chair appears in front of you.
DIFFRIENT: I'd like to amend a statement made by Linton. I don't believe
there is a perfect chair. It's impossible. Sitting is a bad deal from the
start. I do have a fantasy work space. My ideal office wouldn't have a chair.
You would do two things there: stand up or lie down. These are probably
the most natural positions the human body can take. Winston Churchill stayed
in bed until late morning working. He did all his dictation from bed. All
the writing he did for his immense volumes, he did standing up at a podium
against the wall of his room. I did a project back in the eighties called
the Jefferson chair, which was a reclining workstation. It reclined as far
as possible without lying down and had accessories that brought work into
position for you. The prototype still sits in my office, and I use it every
day.
RASHID: I work in your ideal office: seat 4A, reclined on an airplane.
A lot of the ideas we've been talking about have an underlying theme:
the need to redesign not only work spaces but the nature of work itself.
How do we begin to do that?
RASHID: In the United States we can build office cubicles a hundred and
fifty feet from the window, with no fresh air. In Europe there's a sixty-foot
limit. This code is in place as part of a culture of aesthetics, design,
and what it is to be human. So you don't sit six hours in the best-designed
chair in the world and get a back problem, because you have fresh air, a
view, and may want to get up for a cup of coffee with a colleague. There's
a whole set of human activities intertwined with the culture of design,
which in America we may forget if we are too scientific in our approach.
STUMPF: I think our sedentary ways have a lot to do with urban planning
and the isolation of people from architecture. My grandfather lived to be
almost a hundred and walked to his mailbox every day. That's what I call
the art of daily living. He knew how to incorporate walking into some little
activity that was interesting to him. In many parts of this country the
ability to compose your life in some way that's good for you is almost impossible.
RASHID: When we began our research on A3, we started out talking about urbanism,
not furniture systems. We talked about the city being this three-dimensional
network. And guess what? The office has many of the same characteristics:
the nodes, the breakouts, the way people interact, the coming and going,
the changing of the landscape. And all this affects--or should affect--spatial
relationships.
Let's talk about systems furniture. Is the reign of the cube drawing
near its end?
COUTURE: I think it's a chicken-and-egg proposition: do furniture manufacturers
make cubes because of the demand, or is the demand there because it's artificially
created by the absence of any real alternatives? What's the future? Evolutionary
rather than revolutionary. Technology will be the driving force behind change.
When all of the surfaces that surround us can be comfortably worn on the
body, when they become viable means for inputting, accessing, sharing, and
storing information, the office space will need to evolve in order to maximize
the benefits drawn from these advances. A deterrent to this happening will
be a reluctance on the part of companies and their employees to venture
into these new territories. Unfortunately there is a greater resistance
to change than there is to stagnation.
RASHID: We learned that you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
One of the mistakes of the paperless office and other experiments was what
was abandoned: the need for privacy, acoustic control, and personalization--things
that the cube was already doing well. We wanted to get rid of the confining
aspects of those systems, which were about pigeonholing people and driving
them into certain work patterns. I believe the office is still a necessary
place, but the cube system per se is probably coming to an end.
DIFFRIENT: I've struggled to design office systems. And the conclusion that
I came to after my last effort was that the real answer lies in work planning.
If you could determine the methods by which people come together and perform
certain tasks, then you would find that you don't have to rely on a uniform
geometric breakup of space. You could pull people together to accomplish
a task as long as it lasted, similar to what movie studios do when they
produce a motion picture. Many years ago when I was working at Lockheed,
there was a design group called Skunkworks, headed by Kelly Johnson. He
did some of the early airplanes. He set down fourteen rules of performance,
and it was one of the most efficient working groups that ever existed. And
they worked in the crudest circumstances you ever saw: hollow-core doors,
sawhorses, and hard stools.
RASHID: It sounds like a dot-com!
DIFFRIENT: But it didn't matter because they were focused on a goal, in
a work environment where everyone believed there was something important
going on.
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