Future's office space is here

By Linda Hales
Washington Post

A boomerang-shaped work space was designed to keep everything within arm's reach and focus on the nature of collaboration. HermanMiller

The locale is Washington, the year is 2054. Cruise, who plays a bizarre chief of "pre-crime" police, operates from a fascinating cubicle. When not flashing evidence on wired glass walls, the detective doodles at a high-tech workstation distinguished by floating surfaces and a swooping fabric sail.

However futuristic Spielberg's crime stoppers, the workstation already is here. It is the award-winning Resolve system by the HermanMiller company.

Even before its launch in 2000, Resolve was hailed as the first breakthrough since the standard square cubicle, introduced 30 years ago. Designer Ayse Birsel, a National Design Award finalist, traded sharp angles for the geometry of honeycombs, and replaced confining privacy panels with translucent screens. Still, even she marvels at the idea that her vision might look modern 50 years hence.

The reality is that the design of the workplace is very much in flux. Designers have just come off a decade of wild experimentation. The prosperous 1990s, and especially the dot-com culture, fostered extraordinary freedom to be playful. Some innovations are just coming to market, but now economic pressures are driving change. And important lessons are being learned from the dislocation of workers after Sept. 11.

Gone are the days when youthful start-ups could hang an airplane wing from the ceiling to signal serious innovation to come. Huge corporations are finding that over-the-top headquarters (generally with less space for individual workstations) reek of excess and greed rather than global aspirations.

"Workplace design is quickly getting realistic," says Ed Friedrichs, chief executive of the global architecture and design company Gensler. Writing in the latest issue of the company magazine Dialogue, he adds, "While the New Economy was all about speed and how to harness technology to win the race, now it's about understanding the pace at which people really work and the nature of collaboration."

He has coined a new design mantra: enlightened realism. Innovators, he says, will be focused "on the potential of people rather than experimentation for its own sake."

During the office boom, top-notch design companies such as HermanMiller and Knoll rushed to supply novel furnishings with each new burst from the new economy. Resolve no doubt sparked Knoll's new A3 system, which was not launched until this year. It was designed by the high-profile firm

Asymptote as a system of curving, cloudlike fabric enclosures. The company's sales pitch clearly was written for the era just past: "for breaking the mold and opening minds, for quick moves and staying light on your feet, for late nights and great ideas, for brainstorms and broad minds ..."

Resolve began with equally grand goals. Birsel, founder of the Olive 1:1 studio in New York, began her research at the most impersonal of spaces, a phone bank. Mortified by the sight of shift workers plugged into headsets and stationed at computer monitors for hours on end, she resolved to combat alienation through human-centered design.

Resolve stations are based on 120-degree angles and constructed in communities of threes around a central pole. A boomerang-shaped work surface was designed to keep everything within arm's reach. Openings between hanging screens give the workers' eyes some exercise beyond the computer monitor. Translucent fabrics provide privacy without blocking views.

New York's Museum of Modern Art included Resolve in its 2001 Workspheres exhibition, as well as in its permanent collection.

Discovery Communications was among Resolve's first commercial customers. Its technology division in Silver Spring, which was designed by Gensler, has been a test site for 350 Resolve desks. They fit right into the company's edgy interior of corrugated tin and frosted glass. "We felt it was cutting-edge," says Karen Kiley, Discovery's director of administration. "It's important that our people are happy with what they're in."

Kiley's words ring true for Madeline Burke-Vigeland, director of Gensler's Workplace Studio in New York. After World Trade Center attack, she says, displaced workers operated valiantly from makeshift or borrowed offices (including hers) and hotel rooms.

"Prior to 9/11, people thought they could be anywhere," she says. Afterward, "they realized how essential it is to be with others."