Herman Miller Furniture Systems: The Personal Workplace – A System of Office Furniture Designed for Comfort: Vol 8. Layout Process for a Department

01/01/1988

Project Report

24-page document on the layout process of a department in an organization, containing from 3 to 30 people, as indicated in the following Table of Contents: 1. Introduction; 2. Who Does the Layout; 3. What are the Issues which Make your Department Work Well as a Whole; 4. Making a Picture of the Human Structure of your Group; 5. The Ideal Environment for Work-Group; 6. Asking Basic Questions to Establish the Nature of the Work-Group and its Work; 7. Phase 1: General Idea; 8. Phase 2: Main Centers; 9. Phase 3: Minor Centers – All Individual Workstations; 10. Group Process for Laying our Work-Stations.

Authors:

Christopher Alexander, Artemis Anninou, Gary Black, Center for Environmental Structure, Berkeley, CA, U.S.A.

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Content of

Project

The Personal Workplace - New System of Office Furniture 1988 to 1990

Zeeland, MI, U.S.A.

Office Furniture, Designed , Two personal offices with furniture prototypes built by C.E.S.

Client:

Herman Miller, Inc. - Rob Harvey, Vice President

C.E.S. staff:

Christopher Alexander, Artemis Anninou, Gary Black

Design and construction process:

Theree design principles guided the development of the project: 1) Layout of the personal work space by their users in order to meet their own personal needs; this process is achievable through the use of a computer program developed at C.E.S. which carries a worker through the design process. 2) Use of flexible manufacturing techniques, which allow individualisation of each piece of furniture, without increasing costs; the purpose of this feature is to eliminate the modularity that is part and parcel of current systems. 3) The basis of design is the real human needs and desires, not on the latest trend.

Project stages:

Generic rules for office layout process Use of full scale mock-ups Fabrication of full size furniture prototypes and office rooms by C.E.S. Design Development drawings done after fabrication

Herman Miller, the second largest manufacturer of office furniture in the United States, commissioned C.E.S. to develop the "personal workplace", a new system of furniture, which aimed at changing the nature of the American workplace completely. The emphasis was on ...

References

Scientific Research

The Sequence of Unfolding - Generative Codes for the Design Process

Areas of focus:

Design and Building Process

Guiding idea:

Structure Preserving Transformations

In architecture, as in other things, the "right" sequence is of vital importance. It is a generative sequence of progressive differentiations, which allow space to unfold in the right order. Each differentiation acts on the product of the previous ...

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