Where Do We Go From Here?

What’s the next wave of ideas about how people work, and how are you adapting your workplace designs to these complex, often contradictory set of needs?

HELLWIG: Many end users are looking for more open, light-filled environments that are healthy and somehow inspiring to the creative people who drive their business growth. A variety of different settings rather than a monolithic single solution seems to be what is necessary to support this kind of workforce. Current and future designs need to be simpler in one way (components, basic desks and tables) but more nuanced and tunable in others. Open environments are not without enclosure needs. Designers will need tools to attenuate sound and isolate noise, and we will need to fully understand the relationship between furniture and architecture in this area.

REUSCHEL: The typical modern office worker is occupying a smaller, noisier, and more densely populated environment than ever before. One recent phenomenon to reduce the individual-space footprint is the application of benching solutions. It is often advocated as a more collaborative, European work style that enhances communication while providing greater access to daylight and views. Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence that this configuration enhances collaboration or communication. To compensate, we must return to the European application, where a spatial break is made, separating groups of people into small groups.

LUDWIG: There are cultural differences and preferences, but there are some real and deep common threads. When viewed through our dual lenses of sociology and technology, connecting people in a networked world becomes a dominant theme. As we understand more, we are focused on enabling and amplifying the connections between people (eyes to eyes) as well as with their devices (eyes to information). We don’t believe that one size fits all or one universal planning paradigm fits every problem. If the products could be seen as the hardware, the applications or insights into planning as the software, both have to be tailored to the needs of the users.

GOEMAN: New Urbanism holds a lot of relevance for interior-design planning. It can teach us a lot as we compress space requirements for what individuals need when working alone, and enrich and enlarge space to support the needs of collaborative groups and the community. This means we need to simplify and dematerialize the workstation and reappropriate more value to the shared-space areas of a floor plate. These days, traditional corporate offices are competing with the richness of the urban experience to attract people who can work almost anywhere they choose. The highest degree of knowledge transfer will likely occur in the corporate office—provided people choose to show up there instead of at a coffee shop.

How is the proliferation of portable electronic communication devices changing the look, size, and function of your furniture designs?

GOEMAN: Obviously there’s an incredible shrinkage going on in the space required to accommodate these technologies, leading to this logic: the tools require less space; office footprints can shrink; material appropriations can lessen; walls can come down; and the spatial depths can decrease.

JOHNSON: When any vertical surface can become a touchscreen, any phone is a projector, and surfaces are no longer needed to hold laptops because we’re all using netbooks, furniture looses specificity. Our goal is to understand the interfaces but avoid tightly tethering the technology to the furniture and hobbling its potential adaptability.

LUDWIG: Take a look at the space around you and how you are doing things today versus five years ago. It’s different. Having more devices has a bigger impact than simply needing more outlets for power. It has work-process, social-protocol and IT-policy, posture, and planning impacts. We look at behaviors and devices as fixed or mobile. They enable and compound each other in a reciprocal effect. One thing that is clear to me: even if the computer didn’t produce the paperless office, mobility will. That is having a big impact on the whole picture.

The sustainability goal will, eventually, be zero carbon. How are you adjusting your sourcing, manufacturing, shipping, marketing, and other systems for this daunting goal?

LUDWIG: Let’s frame the term zero, because it can be misleading. As long as we’re in business—or on this planet breathing—each of us will have a carbon footprint. We can neutralize it by offsetting it in some way, but that’s not the same thing as not having one. Investments like our Wege Wind Energy Farm help us offset what we cannot eliminate today, but should never lull us into believing that our investment makes our footprint zero or voids our accountability. Many of our operations and offices are in states where the burning of fossil fuel (namely coal) is the foundation of the energy grid. We also know that the world’s commercial and personal transportation system is fossil-fuel based. Therefore, lowering our footprint by lowering our demand and reliance on fossil-fuel-based energy is a critical part of our company’s carbon strategy. This applies to the way we run our business as well as the way we design product.

REUSCHEL: Our greatest contribution will be creating interiors that are adaptable and mutable. Interiors that can be reconfigured to the needs of the next tenant is our long-term goal.

JOHNSON: Cost, not carbon, is the sustainability driver. The ideal is for us as global citizens to realize that pollution has a front-end as well as a back-end cost. Those costs have been pushed off onto the environment by both producer and consumer. Lean manufacturing processes taught a long time ago that sound environmental practices are not just good business but great business.

GOEMAN: Zero carbon is probably the most holistic driver of sustainability values in application, so long as it’s pursued as a consequence of how we do business—as opposed to acquiring offsets.

Great contract furniture is made to last a long time, yet changes in function and style demand products that can be easily recycled. What is your response to this growing need to reclaim materials while keeping your product lines fresh and timely?

REUSCHEL: In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand speaks of layers of a building in terms of time they’re meant to last (structure, 30–300 years; space plan, 3–30 years). Adaptable buildings allow slippage between the layers. One of the cardinal sustainability sins of new product development is to create composites that can’t be separated at end of life. Likewise, intimately integrating short-life-cycle elements (the bathwater) with long-life-cycle elements (the baby) is equally problematic on a grander scale. We must begin by making each layer more considerate of the next layer. This is especially true of the longer-life-cycle layers, as they tend to rule over the shorter ones.

LUDWIG: We say, “At the scale of architecture, we exercise a sophisticated restraint. We seek a certain timelessness.” The cycles of change at this scale are less urgent for good reason: disruption in the workplace, cost, tax laws, et cetera. It is also material-intensive. This restraint, focusing rather on exquisite execution and detail, ensures that the product will remain relevant for some time without being simplistic or banal. We also say, “At the scale of the user, we seek a certain sensual sophistication. Expressions here can be more timely.” We won’t do a cartoon or whimsical chair. There are enough examples in design history where “interesting” becomes irritating and “exciting” becomes exhausting. That is a recipe for more landfill. Our strategy is road tested. It’s simply: don’t follow fashion; create solutions that solve authentic problems; use good ingredients.