Randall Braaksma is proof you can go back again. After a writing start long ago at Herman Miller, and a patchwork of jobs since (ad agency copywriter, editor in China, freelancer), he is back. The common thread through it all: words. The constant goal: make them engaging to read.
More than ever, working together defines how we get things done. And more than ever, getting things done often takes just two people. Recent research we’ve conducted at companies around the world found that nearly half the time collaborative events involved two to three people.
But no matter the number of people collaborating, companies are committed to making it happen. One approach they’re taking is to give their employees flexible workspaces. In a recent survey, 50 percent of corporate real estate executives said this flexibility enables collaboration.
All this focus on collaboration shouldn’t obscure the fact that people also need privacy and freedom from interruption. Research also suggests that some people, and especially introverts, are more creative when they can work on their own. Maybe the best way to get the creativity we’re all after is to design places that give people more choices for when, where, and with whom they work.
The American Institute of Architects each year recognizes one American building that is at least a quarter of a century old. “The idea,” says Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe, “is to recognize architecture that has proved its merit over time.”
This year, the AIA chose the residence in Santa Monica that Frank Gehry designed for his family. As much statement as structure, the house features materials familiar in an urban landscape: raw plywood, chain-link fencing, asphalt, corrugated metal—not the stuff of a quiet residential neighborhood.
But, Gehry has seldom been concerned with the expected. We have our own stories to tell about working with him on a factory-office facility we built in Rocklin, California. It has proved its longevity, too. Now owned by the William Jessup University, it’s become an award-winning student apartment building that preserves, as the award citation reads, “the original conversion of the Herman Miller furniture factory, designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry.”
One Laptop Per Child is a nonprofit that aims to “provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop.” The focus is on children in developing countries, and so far almost two-and-a-half million of them have one.
Yves Béhar and his team at fuseproject designed the laptop, and now they’ve done a tablet version. Just like the laptop, the tablet is simple and functional, with tactile rubber grips, flexible cover, and solar charging battery.
Pro bono design work isn’t new to Béhar and fuseproject. Another of their efforts is “See Better to Learn Better,” a free eyeglasses program in partnership with the Mexican government and Augen Optics.
Good works and good work are both part of Béhar’s vision. On the latter score, 2011 brought recognition for the UP wristband, which uses tiny motion sensors to monitor the wearer’s sleep, diet, and exercise. It made Alice Rawsthorn’s design honors list for 2011. But then, we’re partial to Béhar’s work, especially the award-winning SAYL chair he did with us.
Barry Sonnenfeld, director and Digital Man blogger, sits astride a wheeled saddle to scurry around film sets. Forget the clichéd canvas director’s chair, he cherishes his makeshift saddle-on-wheels, a creation of the Men in Black 2 crew that’s since been modified with “drawers for scripts, water, and prescription medication” for his sciatica.
Where he’s all about moving on the set, Billy Wilder, a director from an earlier generation who did films such as Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, opted for catnaps on set. In 1955, while filming The Spirit of St. Louis, he started taking naps on a narrow plank held up by sawhorses. Wilder later told his friends Charles and Ray Eames he needed something similar—but a bit more comfortable—for his office.
They came up with a slender, armless chaise with a built-in wakeup call. It required Wilder to lie on his back with his arms folded over his chest. Once he dozed off, his arms relaxed, dropped to his side, and gently awakened him. We began making the chaise in 1968, and it’s been in the line ever since.
We’ve added other pieces in the ensuing years. And Sonnenfeld puts three of them through their paces in his search for the right furniture for working in the editing room: the Embody and Aeron chairs and the Envelop desk. Get his read on them, and then check them out for yourself.
Photo: Barry Sonnenfeld is an Emmy-winning television director and the director of Get Shorty and the upcoming Men in Black 3.
“We are at a watershed moment in education design,” says Susan Whitmer in a conversation with Nicholas Jackson of The Atlantic. “The convergence of knowledge and circumstances provide us with the opportunity to revolutionize the built environment for all of education.”
How will the built environment, the physical places on campus, be revolutionized? One way, according to Whitmer, an education consultant and researcher at Herman Miller, is they’ll become movable. In a paper she co-authored on fostering innovation, she notes that education needs “highly malleable spaces that users can interact with almost like a living thing.”
Change is sure to come. According to Whitmer, it can’t happen too soon: “Our world is changing at a rapid pace, yet education is mired in hundreds of years of tradition.” Boola, Boola!
Dear Ms. DiOrio,
Thank you for your letter of praise for what the office cubicle means to you. I presume you thought your “open letter to people or entities who are unlikely to respond” would be lost in cyberspace. (Another highfalutin word I’m sure you feel is unnecessary.) However, I have been asked to respond on Mr. Miller’s behalf.
While we do appreciate your sentiments, I must, on behalf of everyone at our company, correct some of your more egregious errors (the factual ones, not the errors in thinking). Mr. Miller did begin the company that allowed you and Dilbert to flourish (we receive no proceeds from Mr. Adams), however the inventor of the cubicle was Mr. Robert Propst. And, as with most inventors (think Dr. Frankenstein, for example), he became dismayed at what his creation became (“egg-carton geometry” was one phrase he used to describe the way people applied it). Read more
Recently, PBS Arts, in an episode of its Off Book, took a look at product design and what it means to three practitioners. For Yves Béhar of fuseproject, the San Francisco-based design and branding company and designer of our SAYL chair, “what design does, at its best, is to accelerate the adoption of new ideas.” Harvey Moscot, a fourth generation owner of a classic eyewear brand, and Peter Schmitt, an MIT researcher looking to revolutionize the product experience through 3D printing, offer two other perspectives.
It’s certainly the case that the role of design is much in the spotlight lately. It can make the difference, some say. It can change the world, claim others. For us, design is something we get—according to FastCompany. It’s how we solve problems. It’s not just an approach to products, though, it has also become, as George Nelson said in 1948, “a central part of our business.”
There’s an attitude at Herman Miller that’s been around for a long time: treating materials as something integral to the design process. Think of Charles and Ray Eames and their work with molding plywood for the origin. In this second in a series on materials at Herman Miller, Susan Lyons gives a recent example: the Embody chair.
Whatever the example, the point is the same: to achieve what Lyons calls “beautiful practicality.” “When we talk about material utility,” she says, “what we really mean is that we use materials to solve problems.” It’s a symbiotic relationship, with sometimes the material driving the form and other times the form driving the material.
Utility is one of five material design principles we live by: honesty, utility, economy, pleasure, and possibility.
What to get that design-minded person on your holiday gift list? Give them 15 pounds of pure Girard delight. Just in time for the season, designer Todd Oldham brings us the definitive monograph on the life and work of Alexander Girard. This book is massive; it really does weigh in at about 15 pounds, making it the ultimate coffee-table book. (The irony of the name of the book’s co-author, Keira Coffee, is appreciated.)
The authors cover the life and work of Girard in words and pictures, about 2,300 of the latter, most in color and many never published before. We especially enjoyed the explication of Girard’s bold and colorful textile designs for Herman Miller during his tenure as our textile division director from 1952 to 1975. (Thanks to our folks in Archives for making these treasures available for photographing.) For a sneak peak, watch the video of Simon Doonan of Barneys New York speak with Todd about the book.
As the new film about them makes clear, Charles and Ray had so much confidence in the way they went about solving a problem—whether designing a chair, an exhibit, or a film—they didn’t entertain thoughts of failing. Other factors, besides their design brilliance, helped. Two of the most important were maintaining artistic control and having the ear of the CEOs at their client companies.
There is much proof of their successes, including the string of designs they did for Herman Miller, beginning with the groundbreaking plywood chair. But one clinker stands out: their 1976 show for the bicentennial of the American Revolution, “The World of Franklin and Jefferson.” Hilton Kramer writing in the New York Times panned it as overly ideological. Others saw it as overwhelming: too much information, too many artifacts.
But as Donald Albrecht, architecture and design curator, points out in “Eames: The Architect and the Painter,” the exhibit can be seen less as a failure and more as a reflection of the restless minds of the Eameses. Layering the material, as we do today in digital experiences, would have made it compelling and digestible. Perhaps this exhibit was simply another example of Charles and Ray being ahead of their time.
