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My Studio Environments

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Designers

Douglas Ball Douglas Ball
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Case Studies

National Audubon Society, New York, New York
Nonprofit
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Solution Essays

My Studio Typicals

To give you a head start in planning with My Studio, the Typicals Library houses a comprehensive collection of digital drawings that illustrate "typical" workstation clusters.

Environment

69% recyclable
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LEED Credit Summaries

News and Awards

  • My Studio Environments, Vivo Interiors, Leaf personal light, and Celle work chair receive the GOOD DESIGN Award for 2006 from the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Design and Architecture
    2006

Photo Gallery

What's In It For You

  • Product Story

    My Studio is your studio. It puts you at the center of your own work world. Designed around your needs for control, comfort, and privacy, My Studio helps you balance heads-down work with heads-up collaboration. It's a system that provides an environment where you can work individually and collectively in a variety of spaces, making the kinds of connections that lead to fresh perspectives and new ideas.

  • A New Landscape

    For a new world of work. My Studio takes the need to attract and keep talented knowledge workers seriously. Accommodating what they need to feel and do their best, My Studio creates a personal space with furniture-like qualities and a human scale.

    Tallest walls are on the outside, lowest on the inside, inverting the traditional office landscape to promote collaboration and maintain a sense of territory. People can open their doors to signal accessibility, close them when they need privacy.

  • Four Innovations

    Vanishing Point. With curved outer corners, open inner corners, translucent materials, and "floating" walls, your office feels larger and more inviting.

    About Face. The primary surface is positioned so that you can face outward, inward, however you feel most comfortable. Helps keep uninvited interruptions to a minimum and doesn't expose your computer screen.

  • Zone Logic. Each workspace zone supports a specific aspect of the knowledge work process - create, organize materials, and filter interruptions. Display what you need to see, what keeps you fresh and inspired and creative.

    Permeable Privacy. Tempered-glass shutters open like sliding windows, so you can connect, or not, as you please. A door helps you maintain control over how much or how little interaction you have during the day.

  • Choice, Variety, and Human Connection

    My Studio's steel frames are finished with painted, glass, or veneer cladding to create four walls. Each wall has a concise, prescribed set of components that help workers make the most of their performance. The system lets you create compact, efficient workspaces that also support the personal styles of their occupants. Choice, variety, human connections. Just what knowledge workers want.

  • Quality and Coordination

    The concise, coordinated palette of My Studio simplifies design and ensures harmonious combinations. Both warm and cool neutrals, as well as metallics designed for outside surfaces, complement any architecture. Nature-inspired colors create richness and depth.

  • Tech-Accommodating

    In-frame distribution: The center wall routes cables and 4-circuit, 8-wire power.

    Generous capacity: A powered center wall holds 158 Category 5e 4-pair UPT cables or 122 Category 6 cables at a 60 percent fill rate.

    Power and data access: Two receptacles on each side of each frame, and access at the curved outer corner.

  • Earth-Friendly

    My Studio Environments is the first office furniture system to receive McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) Cradle to Cradle Silver certification using standard components.

    It's also GREENGUARD-certified as a low-emitting product that meets current indoor air-quality standards. It may contribute to LEED credits due to its returnable/reusable packaging, durability, pre-consumer recycled content, post-consumer recycled content, lower panel heights, transparent materials, and GREENGUARD certification.

  • And thanks to the resourceful use of durable raw materials, My Studio ensures years of cost-effective service and easy recycling at the end of its useful life. Constructed principally of steel, wood, aluminum, glass, plastic, and laminate, My Studio is composed of 30% recycled materials and is 69% recyclable.

Design Story

  • When he designed My Studio, Douglas Ball essentially reinvented the existing systems paradigm by creatively combining the complex and contradictory features of the private office and the open cubicle. "Workers have not only had to give up offices with doors, they've also had to give up space," says Ball. "So my goal was to optimize their work area so it feels larger than it really is. I want people to come in on Monday morning and be happy that they're there."

  • We had asked Ball to develop a new system that would address an organization's real estate constraints while maximizing the effectiveness of the 6' x 8' workstation. Ball went back to the early days of offices, when a desk, return, and credenza in a 6'x 8' space were considered generous.

  • Ball says he's always loved working in small spaces himself. "I appreciate the interior of a sailboat, for example, and I have an old VW Westphalia bus that is beautifully designed inside, very compact and functional. So I really enjoyed the challenge of designing My Studio Environments."

    He made the person the center of the workstation. He thought about "the very small, very controlled environment. The corners would be rounded. There's a circle and the person would sit in the center of it. You would just swing the chair around and everything was right there, within reach."

  • "I worked out in my mind a plan as to how you would reorient a person in that space," he says. "How would you have a principle work surface, a credenza behind, and something alongside that would give a person more storage and more counter space?" That basic idea is the foundation of the design and development of My Studio.

    The design of My Studio was guided by a number of significant findings gathered by Herman Miller Research, including the following: A trend in workplace design to smaller workstations. Workplace design as key to worker and organizational effectiveness.

  • Organizations recruiting top talent need to consider the benefits of furniture and workplace design for high-end knowledge workers. Knowledge workers need concentration, but they also need to collaborate and communicate. Increased stress can be the result of an inability to control privacy. Increased control reduces stress. Feeling good in the work environment may keep a worker performing at a high level.

  • Ball introduced the idea of a high aisle-side wall as opposed to the traditional panel environment where the center tends to be very high with overhead storage attached.

    "We wanted to do the opposite," Ball says. "We said we'd like to have the center low so you can see across to the other side. You can see the worker across from you, but the height of that is critical. We wanted to be able to block eye vision from a seated position, but if you lift your head, you can make eye contact. With this product, you can have collaboration and you don't have to move."

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