Getting to the BOTTOM of the great office seating debate

One of the enduring passions of the design world is where we put our arses. Every year at 100 Per Cent Design there’s always a new take on where the butt stops. Some are elaborate, others inventive and, if there are a lot of seats to be considered, then things can get quite cosy too. Edge Design Fifteen Environments Edge …

[Khaptain]

MMMmmhhh

Outside of the fantasy styles, the office "workstations" do not look to be very conducive for anything productive : small, cramped and dingy......like working in your toilet but without the luxuy of being able to flush.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: MMMmmhhh

I see that the word "cubicle" has fallen from favor, but the images do show things bearing an alarming resemblance to.. uh.. ..them.

I gather that rounding off the corners changes them from mere cubicles into "micro-architectural office systems." Works for me, altho I would also be okay with "roundacles..."

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: MMMmmhhh

Indeed, these cubicle replacements are the very thing for middle managers supervising the output of "perspiration-encouraging manufacture halls".

[Anonymous Coward]

Want one!

Looking at that Goomolo tyre chair, it occurred to me that combining that design with a Segway mechanism you could have an all-terrain wheelchair that would extend the mobility of the disabled and be the most remarkable fun for the able bodied. Give it a good turn of speed, and crappolo castor-wheeled office chairs could go the way of the dodo.

[Return To Sender]

Re: Want one!

Now there's an idea. Sod office curling, we want office Formula One!

[Phil O'Sophical]

Amazing

So many companies working so hard to encourage you to work from home...

[Sir Runcible Spoon]

Sir

One look at those exhibits and I was thinking I would rather spend a day at the Caravan show.

[rhydian]

All this "design" and no mention of sorting out the worst part of office design: Wiring everything up.

Floor boxes last about 10mins before the lids get trashed

Dado trunking means you end up with desks around the perimiter

[Riku]

Or floor boxes that are too shallow so that rear-entry cables end up folded at sharp right-angles under the lid or power sockets that appear to have been laid out by someone that doesn't realise which side the cable leave a UK plug so that the cable comes out hard upagainst the wall, or a neighbouring plug.

[Nigel 11]

Floor boxes - don't get me started

Oh yes, floor boxes, the most moronic architectural fad since Le Corbusier decided ugly was beautiful and concrete chairs were comfortable. But a lot more dangerous.

They're supposed to be "flexible". That means, you might be able to have them moved, if you have a large stock of spare matching carpet tiles, can afford to employ a carpet fitter, and an electrician, and a network technician. You may also need to replace the entire cat-5e or fiber run, if the original installer didn't think to leave a couple of meters of spare length under the floor in case the box needed moving a few feet.

In practice the furniture gets moved, the boxes don't, and cables are left trailing across the floor under people's feet and wheely-chair wheels. When cat-5e fly-leads get crushed, data unreliability results. Worse, when mains cables get crushed, a fire or shock hazard results. I have seen more than one instance where the insulation was melting because the underlying copper was fractured, and others where live copper was exposed. And of course there's the trip hazard. Get a cable caught around your ankle, and if you are lucky you get a sprain that develops into arthritis during your retirement and puts you in a wheelchair in your 80s. If you are unlucky you trip, bang your head on the corner of someone's desk, and are dead or a vegetable an hour later.

And when the much maligned Health and safety people spot the hazard and insist that the floor box is moved, the architect-types then tell you that it's impossible to get the box within two feet of this or that wall or pillar, so you discover that several square meters of expensive office space are effectvely unusable.

All of which happens after the architect has won some sort of award for a beautiful expanse of carpet tiles and unused desks uncluttered by visible sockets, and has moved on to fuck up someone else's workplace.

[ecofeco]

Re: Floor boxes - don't get me started

Gospel truth, that is.

[Neil Barnes]

All very 'pretty'

But what are those chairs like to *sit* in - given that I spend a third of my life with my arse parked at a desk, I want a decent chair to park it in...

When I was a project manager, one thing that was always ignored was office seating. Fifty bucks a seat if we were lucky. I howled to spend more on decent seats and was always knocked back, even when I pointed out that one or two days lost to backache would have paid for the chair. Inevitably we returned a few months later to get some better chairs in...

[Unep Eurobats]

Wire me up

Love some of those. Why do I never work anywhere that has that sort of funky furniture?

It can't be long before chairs are fitted with sensors that feed data on the sitter's posture back to their smartphone.

[Terry 6]

Re: Wire me up

Feed back how hard you're working to the beancounters more like.

[Unep Eurobats]

Re: Wire me up

Yes, I wonder if there's an algorithm to distinguish between the posture and movement of someone hacking out reams of bleeding-edge code and those of someone idly browsing El Reg?

Hang on, got to go, email from HR...

[Pen-y-gors]

Essential extra

Do these 'chairs' come with the phone number of a good chiropractor ?

Most of them look like the forerunners of a lifetime of interesting spinal agony.

[ElReg!comments!Pierre]

Buy a proper camera FFS

Were these snaps taken through a 18th century handcrafted wine decanter?

[toxicdragon]

My main issue with stuff like this is not so much the design but the material it is made out of. It might just be me but the weave in standard office chairs, the blue kind with the back that breaks the second you look at it, feels like sandpaper to me, I don't know if anyone else gets this but I just find it horrible.

[breakfast]

Good news

We learn that Samsung have "a synthetic material for work surfaces called Staron that can be shaped and used in similar way to Corian."

That is pretty great, because I knew nothing about Staron, but hearing it can be used in a similar way to Corian has made everything completely clear thanks to my in-depth knowledge of furniture-related materials.

[frank ly]

Re: Good news - it's got a wikipedia entry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corian .... it's fascinating and admirable stuff.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Good news

If only you had access to some sort of world-wide collection of interconnected pieces of information, perhaps with some sort of index...

It's likely most folks who have ever, say, shopped for kitchen counters are familiar with Corian, as it's the oldest and most common of the "solid surface"¹ fixture materials. Staron, on the other hand, seems to have a much smaller market share (haven't found any figures), so it's quite reasonable to expect that clause to be useful to a number of readers.

¹I know, I know. But it's what they call them.

[Shady]

Vitra Workbays. known to those that have to use them...

...as office cubicles with rounded corners. Patent Pending Filed

[Tikimon]

I bought my own chair, best $150 ever spent

I spend more time in my seat at work than anywhere else on the planet. I realized that my arse and back deserved far better than the cheap task chair my company provided. I found a comfy leather chair with multiple adjustment points and it changed my life! The extra comfort and custom fit really makes the day better.

DON'T WAIT! Spring a few bucks for a good chair for yourself, it's totally worth it. Over the life of the chair so far, mine works out to about $5.00/month. That's 1/20th of what I pay for my smartphone.

It's pretty cool too that an IT geek has a nicer chair than the CEO, lol...

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: I bought my own chair, best $150 ever spent

I've always found the cheap chairs to be far more comfortable, particularly when sitting for a long stretch, than the expensive ergonomic ones. I had one of those Herman Miller Aeron chairs (inherited from a previous office inhabitant) for a while, for example, and hated it.

Different chairs work for different folks. I'm glad to hear you found one you like, but all the evidence¹ suggests I'm much better off saving my money.

¹I've been using office chairs for three decades or so now. And I've used quite a number of different chairs in that time, thanks to changing offices, visiting other offices, having a second office for my academic work, etc.

[Matt Bryant]

'Nice' cubicle walls....

.....but can you actually push a thumb-tack into them? That is usually a far more important consideration for the average cubicle prisoner - can I pin up my internal phone list / vi editor commands cheat sheet / amusing pic of kittens - than arty-farty design considerations. Did any of these designers actually bother to talk to the people that might end up using their product? The Vitra Workbay looks positively claustrophobic, like you wouldn't have enough room to push your chair back to get up without having to crab out from under the desk - major design failure! And - seriously - the W chair!?!? It looks like a very crap version of the American highschool chair-desks.

[Nigel 11]

Re: Thumb-tacks

You must have an enlightened employer with good fire sprinkler coverage.

Often, between health-and-safety and tidy-minded managers, this practice is banned. Health and safety do have a point - large amounts of vertical paper will make a fire spread faster. As for the managers, "a tidy mind is an empty mind" and they are the un-dead proof.

[ecofeco]

Record sales for Herman MIller

Just heard on the news the other day that Herman Miller has had record sales driven by their commercial office division.

Nice for some one. I'm lucky if the places I've worked had cube farms that are less than 10 years old. And that's at Fortune 500 companies. (worked at one that still had cubes from the 1980s. No joke)

Now some of the energy companies I've worked for, different story. Top of the line Steelcase and Herman Miller even for the worker bees and nothing ever over 10 years old.

[TeeCee]

"...mainly covered in soft furnishings this year."

Oooooh, now where have I seen partitions completely covered in cloth before?

Ah yes, the old shabby ones left over from the eighties.

I wonder how much their designers get paid for looking at the old crap in other people's skips for ideas....?

[.@.]

Christ, how I'd love to have a cubicle instead of having one desk in a row in a noisy bearpit.

My colleagues abroad have cubicles - heck, some of them even have OFFICES (a perk reserved for senior managers here) but us hoi polloi in the UK are trapped in a shared sh*thole :(

[Nick Pettefar]

Gah!

What a load of rubbish!

These people and companies need to find something useful to do.