Challenging the Cruel Cubicle - ergonomic furniture

Art in America, June, 2001 by Sarah Valdez

In, a recent show at MOMA, commissioned projects and examples of current office design examined the workplace we inhabit now and the one we may want in the future.

... sliderule and number machine on a desk ...

Stayed on the market youth of my twenties fainted in offices wept on typewriters ...

--Allen Ginsberg, from "My Alba" (1953)

Many state-of-the-art, "ergonomically correct" desk chairs were on display in "Workspheres: Designing the Workplace of Tomorrow" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There were also several newfangled cubicles (workstations) on view. Among these is Brian Alexander's Drift, which has a tricycle as a seat. A tray is appended where the handlebars would normally be. It parks in a semicircular fiberglass niche wherein many papers can be displayed. Ayse Birsel's Red Rocket Desk looks ms if it might fly away on its whimsical winglike attachments, which were added to a peanut-shaped table to provide its user with an illusion of privacy. There are shelves, tables and benches begot to solve the myriad problems created by other shelves, tables and benches. And generally speaking, all the keen, bright items shown in the exhibition space do seem as if they might, at least momentarily, make work more fun, less worklike.

Paola Antonelli, curator in MOMA's Department of Architecture and Design, organized the exhibition, spurred by her concern for the poor conditions suffered by many glass-tower corporate employees: inadequately organized space, lack of privacy, badly designed equipment, unpleasant lighting. The list goes on. Innovative, existing objects were included in the show. MOMA also allotted funding for six original projects to be created, and Antonelli delineated six problems culled from a large quantity of newspaper and magazine articles on workplace woes. Design teams and solo designers were chosen to create solutions based on Antonelli's perception of their particular strengths.

Hella Jongerius was hit with the challenge of imagining a "domestic office." She created an adjustable bed with two computer monitors built in. This is accompanied by a keyboard and mouse built into a cozy "smart pillow" that molds to one's lap. Softness is also part of the solution in "a space for creativity, isolation and relaxation" by LOT/EK Architecture, the dynamic duo of Giuseppe Lignano and Ada Tolla. Their Inspiro-Tainer is a converted air-freight cargo vessel. Inside is a three-piece chaise longue, as well as a host of electronic devices such as a DVD system, stereo, telephone, rear-screen projector and a Plexiglas panel that can be made either opaque or transparent, so that projections can be viewed within the pod or outside it. Several plugs protrude from the hard-edged container, which thumps and bumps like a low-riding car as its inner gadgetry operates.

Naoto Fukasawa was asked to invent "a place for individuality within a corporate environment." His fanciful response is a chair with a back that changes color like a chameleon, electronically duplicating its sitter's clothing. He also made a screen saver of sorts to be projected above a person's desk: users may express themselves by calling up a projection of the sky in whatever season or weather condition they might be in the mood for.

John Maeda and Joe Paradise of MIT Media Laboratory worked with student designers to accomplish Antonelli's rather daunting assignment to "redesign time." The group made an interface in which a body of information displayed on a big screen can be simultaneously manipulated by three different people. Those who queued up at MOMA to interact with Atmosphere, as the project is called, had a hard time figuring out how to navigate it. But it would likely fare better with people who understand (and have use for) the technology.

Mind'Space, a lovely desk area shaped somewhat like a conch shell made of light wood and translucent plastic, is the product of a team of seven that Antonelli put together based on their common interest in making objects that respond to cognitive-science paradigms. Among the group's areas of expertise are multimedia design, architecture, and furniture design and manufacture. Their communal creation has a curved desk top that allows for several activities to have space at once. The office walls have special contours to create buffers against audio and visual input, and to provide varying degrees of privacy; the seat looks like an egg cup. Like many of the "Workspheres" inventions, however, Mind'Space seems almost aggressively out of it in terms of practicality. Good-looking though it is, it takes up space awkwardly, and would fit inefficiently into a floor plan.

My favorite commission is perhaps the least pragmatic, Marti Guixe's H!Bye. The designer was set to the task of "improving conditions for the traveling worker," and decided that the most useful thing for ameliorated travel would be a healthy--or at least an adaptable--body. His "Workspheres" contribution is a set of illustrations--like imaginary advertisements--for a pharmacopoeia of "oral units" or "nomadic worksphere seeds." There's a silver "go crazy" pill that is supposed to interact with dental fillings. There are pills to "write everywhere," "relax everywhere" and "concentrate everywhere." Model vending machines in the gallery provide an example of how these mind-altering seeds might be efficiently and practically dispensed in, say, airports. Guixe also made line drawings on the gallery walls, illustrating a little guy engaged in various activities that might improve one's journeys: "carry nothing," "take care," "approach everyone," "give memory, gifts" and "drink water," reads the accompanying text.