The Case for Mobility

March 7, 2022

Things Have Changed, So Should Your Office Furniture

Johnson Wax Administrative Building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939

“Not all organizations are intelligent and progressive,” Propst said two years before he died in 2000. “Lots are run by crass people. They make little, bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rathole places.”

New York Times: Who Made That Cubicle?


Robert Propst is considered by most to be the “Father of the cubicle,” yet neither he, nor his design director George Nelson ever intended their developments to be so confining, or so inflexible. Neither did other pioneers of modern office design: they envisioned a flexible space that focused on employee health and productivity. The requirements of today’s workplace are far different than yesteryear. Yet workstation design is primarily stuck in the past, prohibiting our workspaces from providing the true flexibility which Robert Propst, Florence Knoll Bassett and many others envisioned. The resulting battle between collaborative and private work forced employees to fit their work style, habits and needs into the space and furniture as designed.


Furniture’s primary goal is function, not aesthetics. If your furniture is not functional to compliment how you need to work, it has failed in its effectiveness. There are already solutions on the market that solve this problem. They are flexible. They are mobile. They allow employers and employees the ability to quickly, easily and cost effectively morph and change their workspace to meet the specific requirements of the work at hand: private, collaborative, conferencing, et al. As we hopefully enter a post-pandemic world, the office as we know it will forever be changed: it’s time your furniture did as well.



A Brief History


The origins of modern office design are often attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright who employed an egalitarian ethos: an open floor plan with modular furniture intended to increase employee productivity and comfort. Building upon Wright’s concepts, Florence Knoll Bassett’s Planning Unit revolutionized post-war interior design, using empirical evidence to assist in workspace and furniture design. 


In the late 1950s Germany, Eberhard & Wolfgang Schelle would develop Bürolandschaft, a continuation of open plan design that broke up the space into smaller irregular groupings, divided by small partitions and surrounded by natural light and plants. Heading Herman Miller’s research division, Robert Propst sought to redefine workplace furniture. Commissioning a study on employee health and productivity in the workplace, Propst was heavily influenced by Bürolandschaft.



From this research, the Action Office was released in 1964. It gave employees more space and  included free standing workstations at differing heights to accommodate different tasks and personal preferences. It was meant to incorporate both privacy and collaborative work. It was well received in the design community, but consumers felt the product was expensive, too difficult to assemble, and spatially undefining. In Propst’s 1966 paper published in Human Factors he argued that furniture was too restrictive and inflexible and advocated for furniture that could meet the day-to-day changes of a modern office environment.


Propst’s team tried again, with the release of AOII in 1968. It incorporated panels of differing heights, was customizable and easier to assemble. Much to the dismay of Propst, the modern cubicle farm was born from this design, thanks in part to the level of customization. Additionally, the 1962 Revenue Act made modular furniture acquisitions attractive, as fixed walls could not get the tax credit, but movable ones could.

 

A rejection of the long corridors of cubicles gained traction as the dot-com revolution transformed how we work. Panel heights lowered, sit-to-stand desks gained new interest, and touch down benching were all incorporated into office design of the 2000s. Buzz around the new open office grew as employers fought to attract new, young talent. Companies touted a more “flexible” office design. 


Will the Real Ideal Office Please Stand Up?


Underneath the surface, data being collected tells a very different story regarding the new look of the office. Harvard Business Review published an article in 2019 addressing a number of concerns with open plan design. Their research indicated a 70 percent reduction in face-to-face interactions when offices switched to an open plan design. It also concluded that working from home wasn’t necessarily as productive as many would think.


The emergence of Covid-19 also opened our eyes to just how inflexible our workspaces had become. Early into the pandemic, a report by commercial real estate giant CBRE made an interesting observation:


‘“The furniture products specified over the past 15+ years have primarily been designed with minimal separation, privacy and flexibility for high-density office environments. Through the recent exploration of retrofitting and reconfiguring to support the need for lower density and social distancing, we are now realizing the lack of flexibility in so many of our existing office furniture options.”


CBRE got it partially right. The shift from cubicle farms to an open plan certainly divorced separation and privacy from much of the office, but the lack of flexibility within office furniture options has been a recurring theme since 1968. The pandemic merely magnified the problem.


While many of us had the luxury of working from home, many more were forced to work in environments that could not immediately respond to the changing needs of the workspace. Immobile, inflexible furniture made it difficult for facilities to quickly adapt to a pandemic. And it was costly.


Leading architectural design firm Gensler wrote in their 2021 Design Forecast: “New workspace approaches must be more responsive to rapidly adjust to new ways of working, with flexible spaces and furniture for newly emerging work patterns.”


Publication after publication has echoed the same message: the hybrid workplace is here to stay,  workspaces need to be fluid and flexibility is vital. In January 2022, Steelcase released a survey of close to 5,000 workers in 11 countries, where a majority of respondents admitted they wanted an office that allowed them to do both individual and collaborative work.


How do we best balance the needs to accommodate separately for privacy, and for collaborative work? 



Mobility is the Bridge


“It is… a matter of immediate concern that new office facility concepts meet the needs for day-by-day change and modification of environmental effect… This implies a new service relationship to office users providing programs and specifications for almost continuous change and adjustment to facilities.”

-Robert Propst, The Action Office, Human Factors, August 1, 1966


An example of Swiftspace: every product seen here is mobile/flexible and will fit through doors.

The majority of our workstations are still based upon many of the same aspects of the Action Office II. They arrive in many parts and pieces. They take two people at least an hour per workstation to assemble or disassemble. Sixty years ago, this was revolutionary. Today, it is an expensive and oftentimes frustrating method of outfitting a space. Making any adaptations or changes to an office layout requires project management, design and specification to figure out what parts and pieces to order, and the labor to make those changes. Any modification of space severely disrupts the neighboring employees and work flow.


Outdated furniture technology begets outdated and costly solutions to present day problems. As employers are implementing their return-to-work strategies, many might be concerned as to how they can best support the current and future needs of their employees and enterprise. Determining how much square footage to devote to private space, versus what to allot for collaboration is a challenge which many operations are still unsure how to properly navigate. Do you scrap the sneeze guards, or keep them? Do you spend the time and money to reconfigure your space? Do you invest capital for additional real estate?


Furniture that is mobile – that transforms a space with immediacy – is the bridge between the worlds of private and collaborative work. It is also the bridge between the worlds of working from home and working at the office. Such solutions have been offered for over a decade – from simple mobile privacy screens – to fully functional workstations. The level of sophistication has evolved to the degree that virtually every portion of an office can be outfitted with truly flexible options.


What can you do with such flexibility? Here are a few examples of solutions currently available which transform space in minutes:



Affording such a dynamic level of flexibility ensures an immediate response to an immediate need. It is cost effective and environmentally sustainable, as numerous products are designed to be multi-purpose. Mobile, flexible furniture can allow any organization to recapture real estate and control long term costs. Mobile, flexible furniture embodies what Propst argued in 1966, and it resolves the challenges which Gensler, CBRE and others have highlighted in recent years. Now let’s allow our furniture to fully accommodate how we need to work.


Want to learn more? We are offering a 30 minute webinar on current offerings of mobile/flexible furniture on the market - contact andrew@voe-inc.com to reserve your time slot.