Technology Influences New Forms for Desks : Corporate Cockpits in Transition

It’s the office anchor, the white-collar workstation, a place for punching keyboards, pounding fists, preparing reports and propping up feet.

Staring across a big, impressive one can make a subordinate shudder while you exude that executive aura. Sitting at a little, inconspicuous one tells everybody which rung on the career ladder belongs to you.

The desk, the corporate cockpit, has gone from mahogany to metal, from big and heavy to light and airy, from roll top to flat top to removable, adjustable and expandable top.

For the past several years, the desk has been getting a high-tech makeover, reshaped and redefined to fit the computer and a general overhaul in the office environment.

“The marketing people always try to strive for newness, for innovation, for something to get your attention,” said Jack Kelley, an independent office furniture designer in Grand Haven, Mich. “But when you blow all the smoke away, you still need a horizontal surface to work on.”

Although the traditional rectangle, twin-pedestal office desk remains the mainstay, the nation’s biggest office-furniture companies have been coming up with their own versions of the “desk of the future.”

“I think we’re starting to see some fundamental changes in the office,” said Charles Jones, design manager for the research arm of Haworth Inc. in Holland, Mich., a leading manufacturer of domestic office furniture.

Jones’ design group recently unveiled a $10,000 prototype--a flat, table-type steel desk with a modular, translucent work surface that can be replaced with marble, wood and even leather panel tops, depending on the tastes of the user.

“I guess my intent was to get away from the monolithic desk look, where it looks like a slab of granite,” Jones said.

But the kicker is in the top drawer on the right-hand side. Pull out the drawer and you find IBM PC-compatible computer components integrated into the desk. The hardware is linked to an inch-thin, electro-luminescent display screen and slim keyboard that rest on the work surface, Jones said.

“We just wanted to prove that this is the way to look at the office environment of the future,” he said.

But the industry leader, Steelcase Inc., also has a vision of the future. Last year, Steelcase began selling a futuristic, $2,300-desk shaped like a half-moon and designed expressly for people who work with computers.

The desk is one of the office components produced at the company’s $48-million plant near its Kentwood, Mich., headquarters, a facility that specializes in “computer-support furniture.”

“I think the trend is basically toward workstations that really provide a radial work surface, a cockpit-type approach that allows people to have all the material available in front of them,” said Larry Aldrink, product manager for the new line.

Aldrink said the desk incorporates the traditional paper-shuffling uses with the space and configuration demanded by computers and their components.

Both Aldrink and Kelley, who does design work for Herman Miller Inc. of Zeeland, Mich., say there has been a bit of a backlash to the cold technology of office furniture.

Wood-grain finishes, lighter colors and warmer environments now are being merged with high technology, they say.

“The emergence of the computer created a kind of hardness in the workplace, and now people are looking for more comfort,” Kelley said.

Kelley was on the Herman Miller design team that unveiled the panel office design in 1969. The panels, which cordoned off individual workstations with right-angled partitions, decreased the importance of the desk by allowing for shelves, Kelley said.

An even more radical departure came in 1978, Kelley said, with the introduction of beams on which various desk tops could be fitted.

But Kelley said the free-standing desk, although overhauled, is making a comeback on industry drawing boards because of an increase in private offices.

Now, he said, the configurations are endless.

“The state of the art is somewhat confused,” he said. “In the last 10 years there has been a tremendous variety of desk styles introduced.”

Still, the rectangle desk with drawers on the side, “like the blue blazer and gray slacks,” never goes out of style, he said.

“People are interested in purchasing what relates to their status, their image, what it says to a client,” he said. “If you’re a banker and you want to show the client you’re stable and can be trusted, the old mahogany desk is what you’ll buy.”