Designed to encourage a smooth flow of ideas across the office landscape

In today’s competitive business environment, innovation drives success. And organizations increasingly rely on the collaborative work of high-performing teams to drive innovation. The stakes for solving the complex equation of collaboration are high, yet to date efforts have been piecemeal at best. Most areas of the office landscape don’t foster collaboration. If they do, they don’t allow a smooth flow of ideas across the office landscape. The Exclave design brief was simple: enhance collaboration in groups, for both local and remote participants.

Four product designers from Continuum interact around a table.

A team that gets teaming

Gianfranco Zaccai founded the design firm Continuum in 1983. He based it on the premise that design happens across disciplines and over geographies. In their work for global clients in a number of industries, the teams at Continuum work daily with the challenge of enabling collaboration that generates ideas and solves problems to drive organizational success. In tackling the design for Exclave, they began by creating a project space where they could place, move, and replace all components as needed. They quickly recognized that this flexible approach was the greatest asset to people working together to solve problems and generate ideas.

A comprehensive approach

Exclave is the first suite of products to comprehensively address collaboration—enabling engagement among teammates (local and remote), while allowing great ideas to grow over time. With Exclave, Gianfranco Zaccai and Continuum developed an integrated and interdependent suite of products that align surroundings, furnishings, and tools in a collaborative ecosystem that spans the office landscape. Exclave elements connect people with each other and enable teams to freely share ideas, keep them moving, and use them to create innovative solutions.

A collaboration space featuring a table, media tile, and display boards from Exclave,  as well as three yellow stools.

“...if you do your job right as a designer, you’ll make people’s lives better.”

More about Gianfranco Zaccai

Product Designer Gianfranco Zaccai