Imagine that you’re sitting at your desk, working on a spreadsheet. That’s when you feel a vibration in your hands. Then you see a subtly glowing light. And you realize it’s nearly noon, and you’ve been sitting all morning. So you touch the light. Your desk raises to standing level. And you ditch your chair.
This is the vision of Herman Miller’s Live OS. It’s a subscription service that links to its new line of sensor-laden tables and chairs and can see how employees are using them. Live OS can do anything from alerting the end user that it’s time to stand, to spotting frequently uninhabited desks, to helping a company make its footprint more efficient.
Seventeen years later, the company is launching Live OS, which mixes a century of furniture industry expertise with a Silicon Valley subscription model, reminiscent of Spotify or Netflix.
The Live OS-compatible furniture itself only represents about a $100 premium over unconnected models. These pieces are loaded with sensors; The sit/stand desk, for instance, doesn’t just know if it’s in low or high position–through infrared sensors, it can see if a person is using it at all. And crucially, it can distinguish a human figure from the chair itself. Herman Miller is also currently developing a version of its famous Aeron chair, fit with capacitive thread that can sense when you sit.
When an employee first gets their furniture, they set up preferences via a smartphone app. Those preferences might include standing goals, in which case the software will send a subtle reminder to stand up through the furniture’s ambient vibration and light notifications–both chosen because they’ll age gracefully in a corporate setting, compared to something like a touchscreen. The sit/stand desk also features infrared, so it’s smart enough to know if you’ve gotten up for, say, a bathroom or coffee break, even as your desk stays in the seated mode. If so, it might cancel a standing reminder that comes later, so that it doesn’t bug you unnecessarily.
Herman Miller believes its connected desks can make corporations healthier, too, by making their space planning more efficient and data-driven. “If we zoom way out, office planning was a lot more predictable when everybody used desktop technology,” says Anderson. “For every X desks you use X conference rooms. But with new spaces you see more variety and shared areas, it’s very difficult to measure the effectiveness of a space.”
Like all methods of workplace tracking, there will always be tension in how an employee’s data is used by their employer. But for now, Live OS is an intriguing product, the ramifications of which are more likely to play out over years rather than months, as early partners sign on. And incidentally, if you’ve been reading this from your chair, it’s probably time to take a break and stand up.