Herman Miller Furniture Systems: The Personal Workplace – A System of Office Furniture Designed for Comfort: Vol 2. Catalog – The New Line of Furniture

01/01/1988

Project Report

33-page document, which includes an Introduction, list of the twenty nine items of furniture available with descriptions for each one. The items of furniture are chosen with the intension to allow the user to find a way in which he/she can tailor his/her own office, to reach a state that works perfectly for the user. The main target of the system was not the furniture itself, but the space as a whole; it was designed to make rooms personal to the user.

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 ...