The Burdick Group office system.

Asked how to measure a designer’s impact on society, Bruce Burdick, a designer himself, replied: “A designer’s influence on public opinion comes down to how the public utilizes their designs. They influence people’s perceptions of what a car, a desk, your clothing, or your house can be.” To this he added, “It’s the highest order of design to squeeze function and pleasure together so tightly that a person cannot separate them.”

Burdick established his reputation by pioneering the use of computers in exhibition design. Two of his exhibits, one on nutrition and the other on economics, are on permanent display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

For Herman Miller, Burdick challenged the very notion of what people thought office furniture could be. By designing a flexible system based on a central rail, Burdick allowed various elements—display, storage, work surfaces, and ergonomic tools—to be arranged and rearranged, creating infinite configurations and responding to individual ways of working. Named the Burdick Group, the system was ahead of its time and earned Burdick recognition from the Institute of Business Designers, the Industrial Designers Society of America, and Time magazine.

Today, the Burdick Group Dining Table is part of the Herman Miller Collection.

Pitt County Memorial Hospital Chapel, a LS3P project. Photo: Mark Herboth

Just like any good design, the best examples of healthcare architecture are human-centered and problem solving. Marc Marchant, Vice President and Principal with Charleston, South Carolina-based LS3P Associates, recently spoke with Discover about the complicated yet rewarding world of healthcare design. Marchant, a thirteen-year industry veteran, is a former recipient of the Herman Miller Health Care and American Institute of Architects’ Healthcare Interns Scholarship.

What are a few of the challenges unique to designing spaces for healthcare?
In healthcare, there are complicated buildings that require a very solution-based outcome—not just for the building, but for the patients and staff. How do you create a building that comforts patients, creates a meaningful work environment for staff and is extremely functional? How do you take something as mundane as an MRI room and create a space that is conducive to keeping patients calm during an otherwise unnerving procedure?

How do you work with a client to help them stay true to their vision?
The design and construction process can take years, so it starts with the design team and owner collaborating to establish the big vision and always looking back at that big idea to make sure they are achieving it. Everyone needs to have buy-in from the beginning to achieve the vision.

What’s the role of sustainability in healthcare design?
Fundamentally, the tenants of sustainability help us create buildings that are healthier for people and for the environment. The good news is that in healthcare design, many products and installation methods support sustainability as a baseline. The industry demands it because it’s the right thing to do. Some of the challenges include water use and mechanical design, all of which can be achievable in hospitals. Our role as designers is to communicate the benefit analysis for our clients.

Tell us about a project you were proud to be a part of.
One of the things I appreciate about healthcare design is that the half-million dollar projects are just as important as a $50 million project in terms of applying good healthcare practices. About three years ago, LS3P completed the design for Hampton Regional Medical Center, a replacement hospital in a rural county in South Carolina. The biggest challenge was to support the CEO’s vision, which was to maintain the health center for the county, to grow its support to the community, and to magnetize an affiliation with a larger medical system.

We’re real proud of the results. The new hospital is a beacon in the community; it’s welcoming and accommodating, with expanded, state-of-the-art services to attract doctors and nurses. It has become a place of gathering for the community, and a large healthcare system in Charleston is now affiliated with it. The story was less about architecture and more about how good design and really listening to your clients can create a positive outcome for the community.

George Nelson, designer and Design Director for Herman Miller from 1946 to 1972, has written that “every design in some sense is a social communication.” So what is design saying? Nelson spent a good deal of his life answering that question, along the way skewering those “social communications” that weren’t worth listening to.

Nelson’s writings on design predated a phenomenon Steven Heller notes: art schools teaching writing. That’s no surprise, says Alice Twemlow, who with Heller co-founded the MFA Design Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts. Design is all around us, so it’s important that there be insightful writing on the subject.

Few have been as insightful as Ralph Caplan, another friend of ours and recent recipient of the AIGA Medal for contribution to writing about design. When he wrote that it is “a process for making things right,” he could have been describing Herman Miller’s approach. Solving a problem that people really care about in a way that improves on other solutions is the way another pretty good writer, Clark Malcolm, put it.

So if solving problems by design is so important, why bother writing about it? The world has plenty of intransigent problems that could benefit from design thinking. For the answer, we give Caplan the last word: “Thinking about design is hard, but not thinking about it can be disastrous.”

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.

As a Japanese-American in a time when the world was at war, Isamu Noguchi embraced both sides of his heritage culturally and artistically; because of this, it is fitting that Isamu means courage.

During World War II, Noguchi voluntarily entered a relocation camp for Japanese-Americans in Arizona as a protest against the camps—and then was unable to get permission to leave. After seven months, he was granted liberation. “I was finally free,” he said gratefully. “I resolved henceforth to be an artist only.”

Much had happened during his internment, including with Noguchi’s art. He discovered that someone had “borrowed” his design idea for a three-legged table. To Noguchi’s protests, the borrower replied, “Anybody can make a three-legged table.” Noguchi designed one as only he could, balancing a freeform glass top on a curved, solid wood base. The ethereal result has been in production since 1948.

Most widely known for his sculptures made from any and every material, Noguchi’s artistic experimentations were diverse: from baby monitors to stage sets, children’s playgrounds to fountains. “I like to think of my work as having some kind of relevance, no matter how abstract or how small or how big,” said Noguchi. “It has a voice which other people can hear.”

Solving problems through design is a core goal at Herman Miller. Because materials are an integral part of our designs, they can solve problems, too. In this segment, third in a series on Herman Miller materials design, Susan Lyons discusses the possibilities of materials and how they play a key role in problem-solving design.

“We spend a lot of time out and about, looking for materials that we may have no idea what we’re going to do with them,” says Lyons. Our job is then to ask, “How can we possibly begin to use this? What could we do with it? What could it turn into?”

The answers to these questions sometimes come naturally. “Nature is the most efficient designer,” she has said, and the best innovations already exist in nature. GreenShield, a sustainable nanotechnology textile finish, mimics the lotus leaf’s “micro-roughness,” repelling dirt and oil naturally. By experimenting with GreenShield and our own materials, we developed Quilty—a high performance textile that stays clean because of its design, not chemicals.

Possibility is one of five material design principles: honesty, utility, economy, pleasure, and possibility.

The meaning of Magis—”more than”—captures the Italian company’s approach to design and manufacturing. “We add to Herman Miller because we are complementare, complementary,” explains Alberto Perazza, Co-Managing Director of Magis. “Even a world apart, we do the business of design in similar ways. Both companies have many and continuing collaborations with the greatest world designers.”

Much like Herman Miller, Magis employs innovative processes that maximize performance, while minimizing volume of material, energy use, and environmental impact.

The names of Grcic, Morrison, and Fukasawa join the ranks of Eames, Nelson, and Stumpf, as Herman Miller is now the exclusive distributor of Magis products in the U.S. and Canada.

Learn more about Magis designers.

Check out the HermanMiller Store for more details.

While the home has been preserved, nothing has been restored. It is just as Charles and Ray intended. It feels warm, inviting and has the patina of use: the paint is chipped, the dinner bell is rusty, and the leather on the lounge chair and ottoman is cracked from sitting. Their collections are on display everywhere. It couldn’t feel more different than the sleek, museum-like interiors that we see their furniture featured in today.

Throughout, there are examples of Eames design–but not the ones you and I know. A patio table built from the base of their famous ottoman sits outside, probably a little rustier than when they used it; a walnut stool became a Lazy Susan holding a TV; and a plant is perched on top of an extra, extra tall modified table base. They simply used what they had to make what they needed.

Outside, old trucks and other toys litter the yard and in the corner are remains of a wooden fort built for the grandchildren.

Visiting the home of Charles and Ray Eames and glimpsing into their life together transformed two design icons into people, who, in many ways, were just like you and me.

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.”

Thanks to Rusty Blazenhoff of Laughing Squid for bringing this video to our attention.

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.

“It’s not about the pieces. It’s how the pieces work together,” says LA-based rapper Ice Cube. Whether sampling beats or designing architecture, beautiful things happen when you “take something that already exists and make it something special.”

Touring the Eames House, Ice Cube calls attention to the off-the-shelf pieces that make up the modern icon. Built by designers Charles and Ray Eames using a steel-frame, factory windows, and prefabricated walls, the home is more than its parts—a fine example of the rapper’s maxim.

Dared to create art on art, local Austin artists and designers turned the smooth, white surface of an Eames molded plastic chair into the medium for their expression. Some turned to Mondrian for inspiration and others to a hammer and nails. The Good Design Challenge was held in conjunction with a recent Herman Miller exhibit at the Austin Museum of Art.

This isn’t the first time an Eames chair has become a canvas.

People work together–in pairs and groups large and small–collaborating in the workplace is a way of life. And it happens everywhere in the office, not just at the workstation. This year, our focus at Neocon is supporting the places–formal and informal–where people are working together.

NeoCon is the annual contract furniture tradeshow held every year at the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago. Today is the first day and our showroom is packed with well-dressed people sitting, standing, and meandering as they check out our latest products.

Stop by if you’re in the area, Neocon runs June 13-15, and see what we have to offer, or just have a seat and rest your tired feet–we have lots of good choices. The Herman Miller showroom is located on the third floor of the Mart, or visit the Herman Miller Lounge on the first floor in the south lobby.

“Design, like the world as a whole, is unpredictable and messy. If you think it boils down to ‘research,’ you’re mistaken,”

Ben McAllister of Frog Design continues to say, “[a]simplistic view of research pervades our culture…. The real world is a complex system inhabited by autonomous individuals. It isn’t so simple or knowable, which is exactly why design can be so valuable. Research can become a crutch to decision-making and that it is sometimes viewed as hard fact,”

The Atlantic recently published two articles on the role of research in design: The ‘Science’ of Good Design: A Dangerous Idea followed by The Art of Design Research (and Why It Matters). They’re good reading and have offer insight into the strengths and weaknesses of research and what is can offer.

Jon French, also of Frog Design, acknowledges McAllister’s skepticism of research, but counters by saying, “Design research is not ‘a science’ and is not necessarily ‘scientific.’ It gives designers and clients a much more nuanced understanding of the people for whom they design while providing knowledge that addresses some of the most fundamental questions we face throughout the process.”

Research has been a large component of our product development process since the 1960 when Robert Propst joined the company. Herman Miller research has always been person-centered, developing a deep understanding of how people work, how they move, how they sit, and what they makes them comfortable. This provides us and our designers a better understanding of the people using our products. But research is an art as much as it is a science, and we also understand that results are not always as cut-and-dry as charts and graphs can make it appear.

Check out the two articles and let us know what you think.

1. You’ve talked about being inspired by the Eames House in your designs. What do you think makes a house feel like a home?

I often promote the idea that the home is the last remaining piece of personal expression left in most people’s lives. Nowadays, we are completely surrounded with products, goods and technology which are designed by others and tailor made to meet the needs of our consumer-driven culture. The cars we drive, the mobile phones we use.

The companies who make these products are constantly trying to demonstrate how they are able to be customized to meet the personal tastes of their potential customers. The fact is, that these items, along with most everything else, are extremely limited when it comes to personalization.

The home is really the last place where one can truly be expressive of their personal tastes, and, as we know, the opportunities are somewhat limitless… This is why we take great care to work closely with our clients to help them define what it is they are ultimately looking for, and to develop a design which will best reflect those desires.

Visit Lifework for the entire conversation with James Meyer.

Two companies, almost a world apart–Herman Miller based in North America and Magis in Italy–share a similar approach to design.

“Both companies have many and continuing collaborations with the greatest world designers,” explains Alberto Perazza, Co-Managing Director of Magis. Like Herman Miller, Magis believes in authored design, working with outside creative partners who provoke them toward something truly new.

It makes sense that the two companies should partner, placing such design icons as the Bombo Stool by Stefano Giovannoni and Konstantin Grcic’s Chair_One alongside Yves Behar’s SAYL chair and Setu by Studio 7.5. As of September 1, 2011, Herman Miller will be the exclusive distributor of Magis products in the U.S. and Canada.

While for many of us—myself included—the thought of a smudge, much less a deliberate brush stroke, on one of our precious pieces of furniture makes us cringe. But not the Eameses, who treasured Saul’s chair, and displayed it proudly.

Surely they would be delighted to see that artists today continue to find inspiration in their work and use their designs as a canvas for expressing their own artistic visions.

Check out Operation Design for pictures from Eames Inspiration, a charity event Herman Miller co-sponsered last year.

We spoke with Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner for part three of Herman Miller’s POV interview series.

Can you tell us how you both got involved in designing pre-fab homes?

We had incorporated prefabricated modular buildings into a few of our projects in the late 1990s, including a two-story classroom module as part of The Accelerated School in South Los Angeles in 1997, and four-module childcare center for the Los Angeles Airport in 1999.  So in 2003, when Dwell magazine asked our firm to participate in a prefab design competition, it seemed like a natural opportunity to continue what we had started. 

The competition sparked our interest in the greater possibilities of designing high-end modern homes within the constraints of a factory.  We were exploring ways to minimize the inefficiencies involved with site-built construction, including weather delays, sub-contractor delays, runaway costs and excessive material waste, and prefab seemed as if it might provide some solutions

Since our prefab prototype the Desert House in 2005, we have developed our modular system and completed houses in Utah, Nevada, and throughout California.  Our project in Moab, UT was on a particularly remote site and in that way was especially suited for modular prefab.  Transportation of labor and materials alone would have made for extremely high on-site construction costs.  Further, the modules were installed less than 12 months from the very first site visit, meaning design and construction were able to be completed in less than a year.  It was an extraordinary case study for how prefab could significantly improve efficiency and reduce costs for the right project.

Visit Lifework for more of our interview with Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner.

We believe design starts with the person—an approach going back to 1976 when we introduced the Ergon chair after 11 years of research.

We’re not just interested in the physical attributes of people, but their behaviors as well: How do they work? What is their posture? How do they move? Even the purpose of their work. Our commitment to understanding the person through research has helped us to balance science with aesthetics and design chairs in which the needs of the person are central.

This approach is often referred to as person-centered ergonomics. We believe it makes sense, and you can see it played out in each of the chairs we design.

Head over to Lifework to learn how to choose a work chair.

You talk about architecture as a puzzle. Do you find there is a language that threads through all your work that helps you solve that design puzzle?

Every project comes with a specific set of opportunities and constraints – in the form of the site (physical and cultural), the program, the budget, and issues that the client may bring to the table, etc. As a functional art, one of the pleasures of the architectural design process is to mold space and material into dynamic environments that solve the puzzle of these various requirements. But of course there is nothing objective about this – the result always reflects the designer’s particular interests, obsessions, and worldview. For me (and this is probably true of my partner, Alice Kimm, as well) this always involves the creation of sculptural forms, interiors that are filled with natural light (often from unexpected sources), the blurring of interior and exterior spaces, and circulation routes that take you through a collection of interlocking interior spaces. What often makes these spaces interesting and dynamic is that they are linked along an implied diagonal, and this further creates surprising views through and across space. The Ehrlich house (above), a house we did before the King house (pictured below), is a good example of this.

Visit Lifework for more of John Friedman’a interview.

Kroloff is an influential thinker who has been a TED presenter, editor-in-chief of Architecture magazine, and while dean of the Tulane School of Architecture, he oversaw the planning for rebuilding New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

In your role as educator, editor, and consultant, you have a unique perspective on how the field has changed over the years. What have you observed?

First and most fundamental has been the digitization of the field. It has utterly revolutionized every aspect of architectural practice from our earliest thoughts of the creation of a building, to the documents, to the execution and construction of the building. Digitization gives architects and designers greater control over their projects than they’ve had perhaps since the middle of the Twentieth Century. Twenty-five years ago, architects didn’t see themselves as part of the building process. They saw themselves as supervisory and peripheral. Now they see themselves as central to it, as they always should have.

The second change is the arrival of women and minorities to the field. Architecture was a tenaciously late player to the game, but it has now come around and is actively embracing this, recognizing that there are tremendous benefits to inclusivity. While ownership and management of firms is still an area where women and minorities are dramatically underrepresented, still their presence in the profession overall is enormously large.

This is a good thing for all the right social equity and justice reasons, but also because it allows the architectural profession to come into line with where other industries have gone before. It begins to align the profession with other professions where women and minorities have already become a presence.

The third major change has been the splintering of the field into subspecialties. Some firms, for example, just design the curtain walls of buildings. Some firms just analyze rental real estate rates and how that affects floor plans.

This creates opportunities for real expertise, but it also splinters the field into such small shards that generalist practices become threatened. The client becomes more confused, and an army of consultants is created, such as owner’s representatives, that are odious in their effect on the practice because they get between the architect and his or her client.

Read part two of our interview with Reed Kroloff.

SAYL received the International Design Award for “Product Design of the Year” at a ceremony Sunday evening. That’s a pretty cool award to get. Getting there took a good designer challenging us just as much as we challenged him.

SAYL designer Yves Behar did just that. He asked, “How do we create a task chair that is attainable? Can we make a comfortable, supportive, healthy, and beautiful chair at a lower price point?” Yves challenged us to develop a technology not seen in low-cost seating.

Herman Miller likes designers that ask tough questions and look for creative answers. We also like to work collaboratively to help achieve their vision. Design and engineering should be at the table from the beginning. We feel a close relationship is a key to innovation.

SAYL’s 3D Intelligent back is a perfect example. Herman Miller worked in tandem with Yves on iteration after iteration, each requiring a new mold, in order to achieve proper supportive flex. It took months of trial and error. Traditional methods would have been easy, and less expensive to develop, but we knew Yves was on to something.

Innovation is not an easy or straight forward road to travel, but we’re okay with that. And an award or two helps, too.

Photos: Live Unframed

We’ve been busy this weekend at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York City. This year’s booth was inspired by the Miller House and designed by BassamFellows (check out Lifework for more on these two very soon). It’s a clear and beautiful design statement that showcases our pieces perfectly, including the new Eames Aluminum Group Chairs (which won Best Outdoor Furniture category in the Editor’s Choice Awards).

Tomorrow the show opens to the public, so stop by for a visit, check out the booth, and tryout one of the new chairs. If you can’t make it, we’ve put together a slideshow for you. Enjoy!

Photos 1-5 via Paul Warchol Photography.

This week in the official opening of the Miller House and Garden in Columbus, Indiana. The Miller House history is intrinsically tied to Herman Miller. The home was commissioned by J. Irwin Miller, a wealthy industrialist, and his wife Xenia Simons Miller in 1953. Miller and his wife hired Eero Saarinen to design the house, Alexander Girard to work on the interiors and Dan Kiley to take care of the landscape architecture. Girard’s fabrics for Herman Miller feature heavily throughout the home. And it was Girard that got the Eameses involved. He saw the need for outdoor furniture and called on his friends Ray and Charles to design chairs for the verandah. A year later the Aluminum Group lounge chair was in production at Herman Miller.

Tours of the Miller House and Garden are open to the public.

Photoes courtesy of the Indianapolis Musem of Art

Photo: Steve circa 1985

For Herman Miller, this was an opportunity to ask the next generation of designers about the workplace, about collaboration, and about how they envision the two melding in the future.

Brainstorming, discussion, sketching, and critique; round after round, the students worked through their ideas toward a final concept. The atmosphere was awesome. The results were even better, ranging from the intangible “office as a second skin” and “implicit boundaries” to the tangible “mobile work pods.”

The experience left us wishing we could replicate that spark back at the office. We value our partnerships with universities and colleges of all kinds; they provide us a fresh perspective, all while connecting with future innovators. Who better to create the future with?

Williams is founder and executive director of ARCHIVE (Architecture for Health in Vulnerable Environments). He’s working to increase awareness of the link between housing and health. It’s a connection that can make a difference: in many of the world’s cities, one in six people live in overcrowded, unstable structures that lack adequate sanitation.

At a recent event at Herman Miller’s National Design Centre in London, Williams spoke about ARCHIVE’s mission to combat diseases by making architecture central to a systemic process of improving lives. And with projects such as Kay e Sante nan Ayiti (Creole for “Housing and Health in Haiti”), he’s showing how we can all participate in creating a better world.

Photo via ARCHIVE
Kay e Sante nan Ayiti competition
1^st Place Entry: Breathe House

Anselmo Canfora (assistant professor of architecture); Richard Guerrant (medical doctor); Ewan Smith (engineer); Galen Staengl (engineer); Michael Stoneking (architect); Aja Bulla-Richards, Sara Harper, Sally Lee, Nathan Parker, Chase Sparling-Beckley, Lauren Thompson (architecture students) 

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced the winners of its 2011 Housing awards, and they are fantastic! From urban settings to rolling farmland to glacial lakes, the projects represent work from all over the country, with so many great ideas—edgy angles, fun curves, creative use of color, and lots and lots of glass.

Living well sustainably and affordably seemed to be key in this contest, which includes four award categories: One/Two Family Custom Housing, One/Two Family Production Housing, Multifamily Housing and Special Housing.

50 Saint Peter Street/Historic Salem Jail, Salem, MA
Finegold Alexander + Associates

The award was established a decade ago with the goal of “recognizing the best in housing design and promoting the importance of good housing as a necessity of life, a sanctuary for the human spirit and a valuable national resource.”

930 Poydras Residential Tower, New Orleans
Eskew+Dumez+Ripple

The 18 winning projects were as different from one another as wildflowers in a field. Let your mind and imagination wander through them. It will be a fun trip from wherever you’re sitting, I promise.

(Oh, and while you’re at it, check out the story on the AIA website about Tokyo-based architect Shigeru Ban, Hon. FAIA, who has designed simple partitions for those living in shelters as a result of the recent earthquake/tsunami in Japan. Also very inspirational.)

One student looked at Alexander Girard fabrics and designed a coffee table from wood pieces formed to reflect one of his patterns. One design includes collapsed fabric and raises to become the Eames molded plywood chair.

Take inspiration from everything is the creative person’s mantra. And we love it when creatives take it from us.

Photo 1: Chris Reinstad, Aeron Chair Organic Oak, 2010
Photo 2: Emily Rich, Perception, 2010
Photo 3: Heather McCalla, LCF (Lounge Chair Fabric), 2010

Here are seven questions for Daniel Korb:

1. What are you working on right now?

Actually, I’m working on different projects, but my main goal is to understand what I’m really after. Since I’ve worked for more than 25 years as an architect and designer I’m asking myself, What do you really want to achieve? Therefore, I started my own project to determine what does really matter [in the design of a building].

Just as a doctor is responsible for his patient, an architect and designer is responsible for his product and what it means for his customer. To add value is key for me. This could be very basic like choosing the right color for a wall or selecting the right material for a product. I do not only want to facilitate the way people meet, but also I would like to add a certain quality to the space in which they meet and a quality to the furniture involved. We know that a good space can inspire us, and I want to refocus myself on how this quality might be achieved.

2. Of which project are you most proud?

On the product level I am very proud of Sense because of its simplicity and ease. The concept behind Sense was to offer a tool-free assembly process that works as easily as preparing an espresso.

On a personal level I am very happy that Susan and I were able to heal a horse (not our horse) that was in very bad shape. The horse had bursitis in its neck and was in a lot of pain. The owner didn’t want to treat it surgically, so we developed a treatment with homeopathic drugs, rest, and special dietary supplements. Now, a year later, it looks better than ever.

3. What inspires you? Where do you go for inspiration?

Hiking, to a museum, travelling, reading a book, meeting people, music—a lot of inspiring things are around us. More important is to see them and have the time to let inspiration happen.

4. What work do you most admire by another designer or artist?

Once I read about a simple fabric that helps to filter water and save the lives of thousands of children. This is the kind of simple solution I admire the most. There are so many things we don´t reflect upon and take for granted, and we should be grateful that they exist. I believe progress is possible and happens all the time.

5. What would be your dream project?

There is no such thing, and this is probably my personal dilemma. I am interested in so many things that it is always hard to make a decision about what to focus on next. So the next project is my dream project until the next occurs….

6. What place in the world would you most like to visit?

This is a tricky question. I have learned that the idea we have about a place doesn’t always match the reality, and this can go both ways. Sometimes, the place is better when I thought, and sometimes it is not at all as it seemed. I am happy to visit the next place and find out more by watching carefully. Be careful what you ask for.

7. What one thing do you want to accomplish before you die?

When I was young an uncle gave me a book by Confucius. There I found the saying: “Who finds the right way in the morning can die unstressed in the evening” (my translation). I am still looking for this right way.