Designed to Work

How do you look at a design challenge with fresh eyes? The first step is simply to look around. Every few months, Birsel and the Resolve project team would gather in a different city to visit several companies, survey their workplaces, and develop a common view of what Resolve should become. They studied the creative space of a California-based Internet company and the endless rows of cubicles at the office of a major airline based in Minnesota.

"People in those little rectangles looked so boxed in," Birsel says. "You couldn't distinguish one area from another." But she realized that there was some higher method to this drab madness. "You can work virtually anywhere, and yet you still come to the office. Why does that happen? You come to belong, to be a part of a group, to exchange ideas and information -- to connect in person."

To be connected is one of the core design principles behind Resolve, because so much of work revolves around connections -- to technology, to colleagues, to customers, and to information. But connections are a tricky business. Birsel knew that she couldn't simply design a hipper system of panels. Aside from being expensive, panels hinder more than they help. If they're tall, they allow employees to hide. "That's part of the cube mentality: 'I can do what I want; no one will see me,' " says Teora. "Cubicles separate people and prevent them from working together. They promote isolation. You can sit next to someone who's working on the same project as you are and never even talk to that person."

Cubicles that have low walls are supposedly designed to encourage collaboration, but they often go too far, says Rick Duffy, 42, director of design at Herman Miller. Yes, people need to work in teams, but they also need to work on their own. Without boundaries, people lack the visual privacy that they need in order to focus; they're constantly distracted and interrupted. "A company that has such an environment is saying that it values community space more than individual space," Duffy says. "But people need to have a space of their own. The challenge is to create boundaries without building walls."

Resolve's solution? Use screens rather than walls, with narrow slits between the fabric and the poles. The openings act as portholes to adjacent workstations, offering access to colleagues as well as the benefit of privacy. It's an intriguing effort to get beyond old either-or distinctions. "My metaphor is a screen door," says Jim Long, 48, Herman Miller's lead researcher on Resolve. "It offers openness but not complete openness, not total visibility."

The idea is to manage distractions at work, yet to allow for what Long calls the "benefits of distraction." For many of us, "distraction" has pejorative connotations, harking back to teachers who warned that distractions would inhibit good study habits. But some distractions can be positive, Long says, if they connect to something of value. "To create new value, companies today have to solve more and more complex problems," he says. "One person working alone has to be really, really smart to solve such problems, and most people aren't that smart. It takes people working together to arrive at solutions, and you can't wait for a meeting to make that happen. You've got to do it in real time, when problems arise. And an environment shouldn't inhibit the process. People need to be able to come together in a friendly and spirited way, so that they can feed off of that energy."

To be sure, that's a compelling argument for a workplace that fosters collaboration, but it also tends to trigger other questions: What about all the noise? Doesn't "more open" really mean "more decibels"? Surprisingly, no, says Herman Miller. Test customers have actually reported that Resolve offices are quieter than traditional cubicle settings. Duffy believes that that's because people in cubicles can't see their colleagues. They have the illusion of privacy, so they talk freely and loudly, as if no one else were around. The open stations in Resolve, and the openings in the screens, make people more aware of their surroundings -- and of their neighbors. "People modify their behavior," says Duffy. "They lower their voices because they can see that other people are trying to work."