by Brianna Crandall — June 17, 2013—Global furniture company Herman Miller used its impressive showroom at The Merchandise Mart in Chicago to bring to life its Living Office vision during the NeoCon 2013 contract furnishings show June 10-12. Living Office is the company’s vision for the new landscape of work and its holistic approach to creating more natural and desirable workplaces, focusing on the needs of individuals and organizations in workplace, education and healing environments. The Herman Miller showroom and its execution of a Living Office were recognized in both Best of Competition for overall Showroom and Booth Design, and Best Large Showroom.
Herman Miller’s Living Office reflects the understanding that the workplace is experiencing dramatic change in the areas of worker expectations, the tools of work, and how work gets done. These dynamic forces require a new landscape of work, one which focuses not on the latest trends but instead on people, says the company. This year, Herman Miller shared a new vision of work, a place where talent can affiliate in an atmosphere of shared passion, purpose and growth.
The company has approached this new office revolution with the proven methods, conducting primary research for more than two years, across six continents, into the evolving nature of work and place. Working with many of the world’s leading experts and designers, Herman Miller is uncovering new insights and applying this greater understanding of people—how we think, how we are motivated, and how we create and collaborate—to the emergent landscape of work.
The office’s longstanding monopoly on work is clearly broken, concludes Herman Miller. Powerful mobile tools and seamless information and communications networks allow work in virtually any setting and at any time. What was once secondary to work—camaraderie, connection, spontaneous interaction, and group expression—has increasingly become primary. Bringing people together, in proximity or direct collaboration, and enabling their ultimate creativity and performance, is the essential purpose of today’s workplace.
In the course of its research, the company has also uncovered dramatic data on the state of current office space usage and performance: typically private offices are unoccupied 77 percent of the day, while workstations are unoccupied 60 percent of the day; conference rooms are rarely used to capacity; and people increasingly choose “social” spaces over less social areas.
These and other insights have led Herman Miller to design solutions grounded in a deeper understanding of daily activities and new patterns of need in work tools and space. The company has identified and defined ten modes of individual and group work, as well as ten related settings essential to todays global work experience. Herman Miller emphasizes that there is no one-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf solution for an optimal workplace. Each Living Office is unique, based on the distinctive purpose, character, and activities of its inhabitants and the design ingredients selected to satisfy them.
The Living Office vision provides people with a variety of spaces that are optimized to support work and interaction. Herman Miller says its global portfolio of products can work together in a Living Office space to help bring an organization’s strategy to life. In a Living Office, Herman Miller envisions that people should immediately grasp what they can do, where they can go, what things are for, and why they are the way they are. The company sees a Living Office as a more natural and desirable workplace that fosters greater connection, greater creativity, greater productivity, and ultimately, greater prosperity for all.
At NeoCon 2013 Herman Miller unveiled multiple new designs that are rooted in natural behaviors and preferences, serving intuitive modes and settings of work and performing seamlessly across Living Office landscapes. These include three major new furniture platforms designed by Yves Behar/fuseproject, Sam Hecht and Kim Colin, and Berlin-based design team Studio 7.5.
Numerous new Herman Miller Collection pieces were featured in the Living Office applications, including: the Eames Molded Wood side chair (which won a Best of NeoCon Gold in Seating: Guest); the soon-to-launch Eames Fiberglass chair; the reintroduction of Isamu Noguchi’s Rudder Table; Leon Ransmeier’s highly considered AGL Table Group; Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s minimal and sculpted Osso Family for alliance partner Mattiazzi; and the comfortable, contained Wireframe Sofa Group by Sam Hecht and Kim Colin.
Two new designs from Geiger International enhanced the Herman Miller Collection: Brabo, featuring a club chair, settee and sofa, as well as side and coffee tables; and Domino Storage, an elegant casegoods collection. Geiger’s enhanced Catalyst Phase II, its furniture-based system for open-plan and private office setting won a Best of NeoCon Gold Award in the Casegoods category. Geiger also reintroduced two iconic Ward Bennett seating designs, Landmark and Bumper, and added MP Flex tables as an elegant and functional addition to the MP family of tables.
Work Seating
As work evolves, the variety of tasks and the speed of transition between them has accelerated, requiring today’s professional to be more agile in shifting between a wide range of individual and collaborative work processes. Mirra 2, Herman Miller’s latest advance in high-performance work seating, was designed to give people support that moves with them.
Textiles
With the belief that wool is among the ultimate sustainable materials, Herman Miller launched two new wool textiles from historic U.S.-based Pendleton Woolen Mills: Loft, a lightweight, hearty heathered flannel available in 11 colorways that will be used on vertical surfaces and screens; and Noble, a seating felt that coordinates with Loft, with a color range from warm to cool and neutral to bright, in 16 colorways. The return of Alexander Girard’s Hopsak fabrics was also featured, with a vibrant range of 17 colors made of 100 percent recycled polyester and using the most advanced environmental construction adding a touch of playfulness to the Herman Miller showroom through application on the Eames Aluminum Group seating.
Healthcare
Addressing today’s evolving healthcare landscape with its shifting technologies, policies and processes, Herman Miller concluded that future-proofing facilities is imperative, to ensure they are designed for change and that they move with—not against—those working, healing and visiting inside.
Inspired by Living Office, Herman Miller Healthcare and Nemschoff introduced several flexible, human-centered interior solutions designed for the entire care continuum, including Nemschoff’s Terra Infusion, which was a Silver Award winner in the category of Healthcare Furniture (non-seating) in the Best of NeoCon Competition. Outfitting patient rooms, administrative areas, team-based caregiver workspaces and beyond, these progressive solutions allow facilities to quickly and cost-effectively adapt their interior solutions to support process improvement initiatives or changing patterns of care.
