Designed to Work

Kitty Corbin Teora spent a year and a half searching for office furniture as progressive as the company that she works for. When potential clients walk through the door, she wants them to realize immediately that Sempra Energy Information Solutions is different -- an energy company that's truly energetic. The young, fast-growing company manages utility bills for organizations that have hundreds or thousands of locations, looking for errors, better rates, and other savings.

"Clients are hiring us to do critical business operations, and they need to have confidence in us," says Teora, 41, director of energy-information services. "It's important for them to see how we work, to see our processes, and to see the people who deliver the solutions. You can't do that in rows and rows of little boxes."

Early last year, Teora found a way to think (and work) outside the box. Herman Miller Inc., one of the world's largest office-furniture manufacturers, showed her a 3-D computer model of an entirely new approach to office environments that it was developing. The offices were open, but they weren't too open. They typically cost less than traditional cubicles, but they were designed to give individuals many opportunities to express their creativity and personal identity. And everything about them said "futuristic." In short, the new system, though radical, was everything that Teora wanted in an office. So last November, she received one of the first installations, and Sempra became a gamma site (read: guinea pig) to test colleagues' and customers' reactions. The first time that Teora took a potential customer on a tour, he said exactly what Teora had hoped: "Wow, this doesn't look like any energy company we've ever seen."

The folks at Herman Miller don't call their new environment the anticubicle. (They were, after all, the ones who invented what later became the cubicle, a system dubbed the Action Office when it was introduced in the 1960s.) Instead, they call it Resolve -- as in a system that's designed to re-solve some of the most pressing challenges of work at the beginning of a new century. Forget cubicles -- a once-interesting idea that went disastrously wrong. Herman Miller understands that too many cubicle-based offices resemble -- and feel about as warm as -- an ice tray. The uniform layout makes it virtually impossible to distinguish one business from another, one team from another. It's all "squaresville."

Resolve is designed to be different, to support the way more and more people now work -- or how they'd like to work. Instead of muted-gray walls and severe right angles, it features lightweight, translucent screens and generous 120-degree angles. Instead of drab earth tones and an implicit culture of uniformity, it revels in bright colors and personal touches -- from small flower vases attached to each workstation to "porch lights" for groups of colleagues. Those are the touches that make Resolve interesting. What makes it important are the design principles from which it was created -- and what they suggest about the future of all workplaces. The Resolve environment is inspired by a manifesto of sorts: Be connected, be open, be flexible, be economical, be sustainable, be inspired, be yourself. And its design wrestles explicitly with some of the defining trade-offs of the new world of work: privacy versus community, order versus freedom, group identity versus personal expression.

Resolve won't be widely available until June. But the reaction from test customers like Sempra, plus generous praise from the architecture and design communities, suggests that the new office system may become part of the solution to the problem with work environments today. When Herman Miller unveiled Resolve last year at NeoCon, the contract-furniture industry's largest trade show in North America, it received the prestigious Best of Competition award, among other honors. "It's time to set a new reference point," says Don Goeman, 42, VP of advance projects. "We don't want to get rid of Dilbert. We want to liberate him."

Designed for Difference

One way to get a fresh take on an intractable problem is to call in an expert who has unimpeachable talent and credentials -- but who has little or no experience in the field in question. That's why Herman Miller called on Ayse (pronounced "eye-shay") Birsel, 35, a highly regarded industrial designer in New York City. She had never worked in a conventional office -- much less designed office furniture. Back in 1997, when the Resolve team took shape, Birsel's modest studio in Soho was outfitted with assorted pieces from IKEA. Nothing was systematic about it. But Birsel, who heads the design firm Olive 1:1 Inc., relishes the challenge of immersing herself in new industries and rewriting old solutions: Just before working on Resolve, she designed a state-of-the-art toilet seat, complete with remote-control bidet, for a Japanese company.