Reshaping the Future : Designers Crafting New Office to Meet Tomorrow’s Needs

Two years ago, Lawrence Lerner and Steve Diskin took a brainstorming inventory of the changing world of office design--its open work spaces, sealed buildings and rampant new technology.

What they saw was a generation of white-collar workers struggling with a host of new ergonomical needs: The open-plan office deprived them of privacy, the chairs for computer users didn’t change position when the user did, the office air was often stale and the lighting was inappropriate.

In short, Lerner said, “People are working in unsatisfactory settings.”

He and Diskin, both veterans in the field of planning and design, came up with a list. They identified 40 products, some ordinary, some offbeat, that could improve the American workplace if someone would just create them. (On the list, for example, was the altogether serious idea of a personal tent to create privacy in an open work space.)

Their next step was to do the creating. The list of products--or “needs,” as they prefer to say--set the initial direction for their new company, a think tank aimed at creating the workplace of the future while improving the workplace of the present.

Lerner, former chairman of Environetics International, a major planning and design firm, announced these goals in April, 1986, in grand terms:

“We are operating in an ideal ivory-tower environment devoid of the prison of corporate, fiscal and political constraints. We will be able to design things without second guesses from those whose motivations are other than optimum.”

In other words, without being tethered to an industrial client’s specific needs, Mega/Erg, as the new group was called, would be a laboratory for innovation, creating patented designs, on speculation, for others to manufacture.

Workers’ Needs

Lerner and Diskin would re-think the office, keeping only the office workers and their needs in mind. They envisioned the ideal workplace as a “total office system,” with custom control of air, sound and light for each worker.

Has the ivory tower experiment worked?

“It’s beginning to,” Lerner said recently. “We thought it would take between two and three years to develop products to the point where we would be fully protected with patents and have operating prototypes. (But) We began to reach that point recently.”

He and Diskin, an architect who later moved into industrial design, now have 27 items in prototype, with patents issued and pending. Working with a small design team and a larger circle of consultants out of a converted sewing factory in Beverly Hills, they are beginning to throw out ergonomical lifelines to America’s growing multitudes of white-collar workers (predicted to be 90% of the work force by the year 2000 and all presumably potential victims of what a recent article in the Futurist magazine described bleakly as “the menace of high-tech employment”).

Their inventory of the office revealed growing complaints from workers of eyestrain and muscular problems, and a general surprise on the part of management at this downside of the computer revolution.

More and More Work

“A lot of people didn’t realize the wide acceptance that the computer would have,” Diskin said. “There was an idea that automation would free people for down time, for thinking. Instead it produced a kind of silent pressure to do more and more work. It has become a malevolent boss.”

Other issues in the office clamored for reform, such as lighting and air quality. Again, their research produced some surprises: Though new policies and legislation have virtually eliminated office smoking these days, Diskin noted, “the absence of cigarette smoke hasn’t made people feel that much better. The ‘sick building’ syndrome persists.”

Many of the materials in new office buildings thought to be benign turned out not to be. “This is typical with advances in technology,” he said. “We suffer a kind of incomplete understanding of things as they change . . . It’s now thought that the problem of indoor air is as bad as the problem of outdoor air.”

Air Purifiers

With those and a host of other design problems in mind, the Mega/Erg team began modestly with air purifiers.

“It’s almost hard to believe how many problems there are with some of the products now available,” Diskin said. “We found there was a lot of weakness in analysis of how air moves and how people buy and install these things. We prototype everything right here--we built our own fan blades, tested them for effectiveness and quiet, and made some working models.”

They work on a tight budget (about $500,000 a year) and keep the design team small, to encourage technical resourcefulness as much as creativity.

Katherine Bennett, whose background is fine arts, joined them 18 months ago, and she has learned a lot about offices. “I don’t know how the problem starts, but beautiful office furniture can be used in a way that doesn’t meet basic human needs. Maybe it’s when the people who buy the furniture aren’t the people who use the furniture.”

Working with a “lot of back and forth with each other and with consultants,” Diskin said, Mega/Erg has tackled, among other things, electronic and paper file storage, lighting systems, work surfaces and systems furniture.

A Private Nook

Looking at a worker’s need for privacy in the maze of partitions that define working space in a typical open office, they indeed came up with a personal “office-tent,” fashioned from retractable strips of cloth that taper down over a single work space, producing the effect of a private nook.

Sitting in their office last week, a spacious loft with white-washed walls splashed with black and white sketches of office systems and equipment, Lerner and Diskin talked about Mega/Erg (from the Greek mega meaning large, great or powerful and erg , a word used by physicists to mean a unit of work or energy), and their belief that the potential to solve workplace problems with innovation and technology has not been nearly tapped.

“Our hope here is to come out with intelligent products that won’t be compromised by middle-management guesswork, or by jockeying for power on the part of executives who can pass the buck and not take responsibility,” Lerner said.

Gathering the Wires

In December they entered into a licensing agreement with MicroComputer Accessories, Inc., for the manufacture of a desk device called a Cable Tower, which organizes the maze of computer, telephone and electrical wires dribbling from most desks today. “It gives you a single power source, so you can free your desk from that spaghetti,” Lerner said.

Noting that built-in partitions now have systems for hiding the wiring, Lerner stated that in an older system, “it should be made available.”

“Part of our philosophy is retrofit,” Diskin added. “We want to develop things that come in a box and can be taken out and used.” To meet the needs of visual privacy, for instance, they have designed an Acousti-visor, a system of baffles that perches like a little semi-roof over the existing panels of office partitions.

Having started with devices that fill individual needs, such as a personal air purifier, they are now thinking of total systems. “The ideal office for most people,” Lerner said, “is one in which they can have, at their choice, visual and acoustic privacy, but also be able to control the amount they have. Most environments that get fixed into place in big companies are one or the other, not a mix.

“Total environment is our prime target, but it is composed of dozens of individual solutions.”