Gem: A New Fabric With a Better World in Mind

Whether it’s an affordable work chair or a textile, we always approach design with a better world in mind.

Enter Gem, a new polyester upholstery fabric that is antimony-free, making it a good choice for the earth. Polyester is one of the world’s most popular polymers; unfortunately making it is harmful to the environment. Designing a better polyester meant replacing antimony, a heavy metal used as a catalyst, with titanium, a much more earth-friendly choice.

Gem is durable, inexpensive, and easy to take care of—and it’s part of Herman Miller’s quest for a Better World.

Stockings Galore at the Design Yard

The lords are leaping and the maids are milking, but who’s been making all these stockings?

For the fifth year, holiday stockings hung along the corridors of the Herman Miller Design Yard and multiplied into the hundreds. And they’re not cookie-cutter stockings either—each are one-of-a-kind and handmade out of our textile leftovers. In fact, every once in a while, passersby try buying one for themselves to hang over their fireplace.

However, these stockings were not for sale, but rather made for a greater cause. In the season of giving, Herman Miller employees volunteered their lunch hours for sewing and decorating a total of 477 stockings. All those carefully crafted stockings were distributed to these handpicked charities: Holland Rescue Mission, Urban Family Ministries, Love INC, and St. Jude’s Ranch for Children. These organizations work directly with the families who took the stockings filled with goodies home for the holidays.

We Care and the Truth About Snowflakes

Apparently, when it comes to snowflakes, we’ve been misinformed.

Adriana, a young and energetic participant in We Care, fills me in, “There’s a factory up in the clouds, stamping the snow, and that’s what’s shaping the snowflakes. They could be the same or different—it depends.”

It’s undetermined whether this explanation had anything to do with the holiday card she was decorating at the time—covered in silver ink-stamped snowflakes.

Here in Holland, Michigan, Adriana was one of 150 kids stamping, gluing, and coloring during the Herman Miller-sponsored arts and crafts extravaganza known as We Care.

Steve Hightower, a Herman Miller employee and avid volunteer of five years, said his favorite part is “seeing the kids smiling and running around. They get a chance to do crafts that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise. It’s really cool.”

This year marks We Care’s 15th anniversary of our partnership with Boys and Girls Clubs of America and local design firms. We Care reaches 27 communities nationwide (with two in Canada), and this holiday, more than 6,000 youngsters came to craft.

Can Design Change Lives?

There’s been a lot of talk lately about design’s central role in our business lives. There’s been nearly as much buzz about how design, or at least design thinking, can solve big social problems. Cynthia E. Smith certainly thinks so. She highlights examples of this in her exhibition “Design for the Other 90%: Cities.” Projects in which the world’s poor have been “rescued by design” range from the favelas of Sao Paulo to the Kiberia slums in Nairobi to the canals of Bangkok. But as Michael Kimmelman points out in his review of the exhibition, these projects succeeded because the designers consulted the people living in poverty for their help in solving the problem. Human-centered design, as many of us have known for years, is the real key to designing lasting solutions to problems that people really care about.

Labor Produces Beauty

“If we think about architecture as simply beautiful objects,” says Michael Murphy, founding partner of Mass Design Group, “then we fail to talk about the process which creates those objects. It’s labor—the construction of craft—that produces beauty.”

Consider Butaro Hospital in Rwanda, an example of MASS Design’s belief in first-rate healthcare facilities for the third world and investing in the local economy as a means of breaking the cycle of poverty. For Butaro’s wall construction, local Rwandans became the masons: hand-chipping volcanic rock and beautifully shaping each piece so they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Built 100 percent by the community, Butaro’s walls are as much symbolic as they are functional. They testify to a community that labored together, using newly learned skills, to build a hospital for themselves.

Patients benefit from their labors, too, in the design of the hospital. Placing beds in the center, making each bed a window seat creates a positive patient experience. An innovative airflow design minimizes the spread of airborne diseases.

Butaro Hospital is functional, innovative, and beautiful. But, to the community, its best design was the process by which it was created.

Herman Miller is excited about working together with MASS. Learn more here.

Working Together for a Better World:
Herman Miller Joins with Mass Design Group

The Butaro Hospital in Rwanda, designed and built by MASS Design Group in partnership with Partners in Health.

People around the world have truly become neighbors in a global hometown, and we at Herman Miller support our neighbors wherever they are–locally, globally, and everywhere in between.

It is in this spirit that Herman Miller Healthcare is honored to partner with MASS Design Group. Started by students from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, MASS has, in a very short time, become a leading organization for pushing the boundaries of design and architecture for the purpose of improving the healthcare and lives of people in the world’s poorest communities.

In places like Rwanda, Haiti and Liberia, MASS applies a human-centered approach to design to create innovative, inexpensive, and effective healthcare facilities. The impact of their work has been recognized at home in the U.S, and MASS is now working with healthcare leaders such as Cincinnati Children’s Hospital on their Cerebral Palsy Clinic.

This partnership is long-term, and we are excited about working with MASS to build a better world around you.

Follow MASS Design on Facebook and Twitter.

Whose Job Is It To Be Green?

This guy wasn’t pondering this question back in 1930. (It wasn’t long after that we were.) Today, more people like him are not only thinking about being green, they’re making their living doing green work.

McGraw-Hill Construction says 35 percent of architects, engineers, and contractors report having green jobs today. The study defined “green jobs” as those that involve over 50 percent of one’s work being done on green projects or designing and installing green systems.

That 35 percent represents 661,000 jobs, or about one-third of the industry workforce. And there’s better news. The share of green workers is expected to increase to 45 percent of all design and construction jobs by 2014.

We’re delighted to see these trends. As merchants of virtue, we are committed to being green, even when it isn’t convenient, because in the end we know it’s as good for business as it is for the earth.

Yellowstone: Making Good on a 1953 Promise

Our 1953 promise to “be a good steward of the environment” put Herman Miller on a path toward helping Yellowstone Park. As the first national park, Yellowstone is often referred to as “America’s best idea.” A national treasure, it faces the complex challenge of balancing environmental preservation with public enjoyment.

Addressing this, Yellowstone Park and the Yellowstone Park Foundation recently gathered fellow leaders in environmental advocacy—including Toyota, the University of Michigan, and National Park Service—to beginning thinking how to balance its objectives.

We were honored to join the discussion and help facilitate a session that began mapping a sustainable future in which Yellowstone remains as beautiful as it is today.

Innovation Inspired By Nature

What do a high-speed train and a nanotechnology textile finish have in common? They were inspired by Mother Nature’s 3.8 billion years of research and development. Increasingly, designers and engineers are looking to the systems, process, and models evolved by nature to fuel innovative problem-solving.

The aerodynamic shape of the kingfisher’s beak, for example, lets it catch fish with barely a splash. The same shape allows a Japanese bullet train to move at 200 mph with just a whisper, and 15 percent less energy.

For us, nature inspired Greenshield, a sustainable nanotechnology textile finish that naturally repels oil and water. By mimicking the “micro-roughness” of the lotus leaf—undetectable to the human touch—liquids roll off the surface, never having an opportunity to penetrate. The result is a Herman Miller fabric that is naturally antimicrobial, stain repellent, and easy to clean.

A Better World by Design

We aim to improve the human experience wherever people work, heal, learn, and live. Problem-solving design and “being a good steward” are just two ways we do this. We also set goals for our business and our people, including: environmental advocacy, inclusiveness and diversity, health and well-being, and community service.

Every year we put together our Better World Report so that you can see how well we’re doing at reaching our goals. Here are a couple of highlights:

11,500 volunteer hours spent in the communities where we work around the globe.

437,225 miles saved by employees carpooling and biking to work.

100% green energy usage in our facilities worldwide.

To learn more, see the web version or download the full report.