Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas

click on the image for more of Steven M. Johnson's designs

A major furniture manufacturer once invited me to preview a new office system it claimed would "revolutionize" the workplace. This sneak peek entailed taking a two-leg flight to the corporate headquarters, being assigned two escorts once I arrived, and signing a stack of non-disclosure agreements. With all the Is dotted and Ts crossed, I was led into a secured room where the revolution was to be unveiled. It was ... a cubicle. It was a very nice cubicle, constructed of elegant yet durable materials, and designed to improve its user's privacy and organizational skills. But I was struck by how little it rethought‚ let alone revolutionized‚ the office paradigm.

A few years later, I found myself in another office that proclaimed to be the workplace of the future. This time, there were no cubicles or even permanent desks. Spaces and resources were assigned on an as-needed basis. I had a file cabinet in which to store my belongings overnight, and each day I had to log in at home in order to "check-in" to a desk space at the office. Here, so-called "hoteling" had become the new cubicle.

Both office solutions were functional but far from revolutionary. The basic needs of employees were considered‚ but only in a lowest-common-denominator sort of way. This made me wonder: What might be the truly revolutionary result of a more open-ended exploration of workspaces? I knew the perfect person to enlighten me--inventor and artist Steven M. Johnson.

How I first came to discover Johnson's work is a long story, but I was instantly enamored with it. His Nod Office, for example, is an ingenious piece of furniture that integrates a bed into a desk. Who among us has not wished for such a thing? He takes the idea of integration further--much further--with concepts such as Road Office ("for those wishing to catch up on work at the roadside ... or [in a] traffic tie-up," he says), the Treadmill Workstation (now that's productivity!), and any number of mobile workspaces, such as the chauffeur-driven executive suite or the Real Life Vehicle, an SUV that features rotating seats, pull-out computer stations, file cabinets, and laundry facilities.

click on the image for more of Steven M. Johnson's designs

Johnson riffs easily on workspace concepts but, as he explains, doesn't "actually think there are solutions to the present-day work-life dilemma! Not easy ones at least. It is too easy for me to satirize and lampoon the situations that might occur, and so I have provided methods for adopting a frantic compromise, a kind of Quick Office, built into walls or in the form of a cart that you move from room to room, pull down the shades, and become off-limits to the family."

Johnson, whose only art training consisted of a few classes at Yale in the 1950s, claims to have discovered his "ability" only after Roger Olmsted, editor of the Sierra Club Bulletin, asked him, in 1974, to invent recreational vehicles (RVs) that by design would satirize those that were tearing up the nation's delicate ecosystems. Olmsted asked for 16; Johnson gave him more than 100. Those RV sketches, Johnson recalls, allowed him to discover that, "The method of turning and churning and imagining new shapes and humorous contexts for those shapes--and never-before-considered combinations of those shapes--is akin to a pleasurable activity and can go on for hours. I stop only because I tire of drawing up so many ideas--my hand becomes fatigued--and not because I run out of ideas!"

For the most part, Johnson's seemingly infinite imaginings exist only on paper, save for a single pair of double-decker slippers with "headlights," which were demonstrated by Ed McMahon and Johnny Carson during a Christmas products special in the 1980s. (A product with flashlights in the shoes was later produced.)