June 12, 2017
Herman Miller Introduces Freestanding, Semi-Circular ProspectTM
Richard Holbrook designed Prospect allowing people to make the most of in-person engagement and collaboration.

Prospect is a portfolio of semicircular freestanding furniture designed to foster collaborative and individual creativity in today’s workplaces and learning environments. Perfect for small to medium-size teams, Prospect is a portfolio of semicircular freestanding furniture, an oasis for creativity featuring whiteboards, tackable surfaces, and media display.  It’s an ideal place for brainstorming, pinning, and visual thinking that allows people to easily bounce between working together and alone.

“At this time in our world, with so many challenging problems to solve, it seems to me that we can all certainly benefit from more creativity, more connection, and better collaboration,” says Designer Richard Holbrook, who traveled extensively, observing offices with the most cutting-edge workplace strategies around the globe. Inspired by the way world-class creative teams work and learn, he designed the Prospect portfolio to deliver much of what he saw to today’s workers and students.

The result is a solution that is both a beacon for creative collaboration and a solo sanctuary.

 “Visual thinking, iteration, quick prototyping, and collaboration are proven practices for getting to the right questions and better answers,” says Holbrook. Inside Prospect’s Creative Space, sharing ideas becomes as easy as turning around and grabbing a marker. The height and space between the round structure and table strike a balance between intimacy and openness, which encourages engagement by reducing visual and audio distractions.

Collaboration is important. But Holbrook knows that to bring their best thinking to team collaboration, people need time for focused work. Prospect’s Solo Space is a sanctuary that functions as an escape, perfect for individual creative work or simply a place to touch down and tackle a few quick tasks. The circular shape offers visual privacy—unique within an open floorplan—and the soft, sound-absorbing surfaces create a peaceful spot for working or studying.

Prospect is designed to encourage impromptu collaboration and to provide a sense of privacy so that people can work together and then divide and conquer, all within an open floorplan. Fostering creativity is a priority for many organizations, but great ideas don’t always come from planned meetings in a conference room. For inspiration to strike, and for teams to develop their best ideas, they need the ability to gather, co-create solutions, and break off on their own for focused work.

Prospect is the newest addition to Herman Miller’s offering of Focused Portfolios, solutions that are designed to support specific purpose, character, and activities for specific kinds of settings and teams, as opposed to Landscape Systems, which are designed to support a broad range of settings and work activities.

Prospect was honored with a Best of NeoCon Gold Award in the category of Furniture for Collaboration.

Premiering at NeoCon, Prospect became available on November 28, 2017.

For more information, contact media_relations@hermanmiller.com.

About Herman Miller
Herman Miller is a globally recognized provider of furnishings and related technologies and services. Headquartered in West Michigan, the global company has relied on innovative design for over 100 years to solve problems for people wherever they work, live, learn, and heal. Herman Miller’s designs are part of museum collections worldwide, and the company is a past recipient of the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. Known and respected for its leadership in corporate social responsibility, Herman Miller has earned the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s top rating in its Corporate Equality Index ten years in a row, was named a 2016 Top 100 Healthiest Employer, and has earned numerous global sustainability awards. In fiscal 2016, the company generated $2.26 billion in revenue and employed nearly 8,000 people worldwide. Herman Miller trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol MLHR.

Related Links

NeoCon 2017 Press Kit

Resources

Prospect Images (ZIP)

Attachments

Prospect Images (ZIP)