Herman Miller New Office Furniture System: Personal Workplace – HMI Team; eighteen short essays

15/07/1988

Patterns for Project, List of Patterns

A set of eighteen essays, twenty eight pages in total, prepared at the commencement of the project and addressed to the C.E.S. team working on it, which set the tasks to work on, the qualities and characteristics to be achieved, the guiding principles and patterns to be incorporated, and the ways and processes to be used. The titles of the eighteen essays are listed below:
1. Start of Project, 15-Jul-1988
2. Real Comfort, 18-Jul-1988
3. The HMI Service, 19-Jul-1988
4. The Components of the Middle Manager Office System – Core System and Secondary System, 20-Jul-1988
5. Ask 100 Middle Managers, 25-Jul-1988
6. Problem of Being Realistic, and Experimental Methods of Reaching a Reality Level, 25-Jul-1988
7. Small Scale of Furniture, 29-Jul-1988
8. Mixture of Rough and Smooth, 30-Jul-1988
9. Extreme Variety of Materials, 31-Jul-1988
10. Openness of Storage, 31-Jul-1988
11. Entrance Transition, 01-Aug-1988
12. Size and Character of Basic Office, 01-Aug-1988
13. Not Connected Items, 01-Aug-1988
14. Different Grades of Objects, 02-Aug-1988
15. Simple as Possible, 02-Aug-1988
16. The Principle of Organicness, 03-Aug-1988
17. Can Organicness be Made by a Large Scale Industrial Process, 04-Aug-1988
18. The Main Characteristics of the New System, 11-Aug-1988.

Authors:

Christopher Alexander, 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

Designing with Patterns and Generic Rules for Making Centers

Areas of focus:

Design and Building Process

Guiding idea:

Structure Preserving Transformations

Pattern languages consist of a multitude of patterns which reflect and define a way of life, people's inner feelings and aspirations, they relate to culture, to climate and to the actual place, and they are rooted in observation. During the pattern ...