There’s Room for Creature Comforts at the Modern Office : Design: Beauty and utility are important to employees. And good design means good business, experts say.

On a typical day, more than 100 million Americans will spend half their waking hours in offices, surrounded by desks, chairs, telephones, computer terminals and the other objects that have become the intimate companions of their working lives.

So the question seems natural: Does the quality of the design of office equipment--as opposed to its technological efficiency--color employees’ feelings and affect the way they work?

“The joy we take on our daily work is unquestionably affected not only by how (office) objects function, but whether they delight us,” says Judith Arango, president of the Miami-based Arango Design Foundation, which sponsors a series of international design exhibitions. “Good design in the office offers emotional as well as aesthetic satisfaction.”

Carol Damian--curator of the seventh Arango International Design Exhibition, “Good Offices,” recently at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena--agrees. For office workers, she says, “the quality of their daily lives depends on the environment and the products (therein) which must incorporate both beauty and utility.”

Beauty and utility in office furnishing design has made a quantum jump in stylistic sophistication in the last three decades. Since the 1950s, designers have radically transformed the shape, size and color of everything in the office--from traditional objects like pencil sharpeners to Johnny-come-lately computer terminals. Those who doubt this need only:

* Compare the boxy, 1957 Formica-and-aluminum desk and shelving system designed by Dieter Rams, director of design for West Germany’s Braun AG, to the 1984 streamlined desktop filing system designed by Denmark’s Jorgen Gammelgaard or the futuristic 1988 Italian “Zelig” desk shelves, stationery drawers and telephone cradles designed by Giovanni Carini and John William Bennett.

* Cradle the Phorm ergonomic calculator. Its curving edge is pleasant to hold and its brightly colored symbols are easy to read, making the small calculator both functional and a delight to the eye. Designed by Donald Booty Jr. for Zelco Industries USA, the Phorm is a prime example of the way imaginative design can transform the feel and look of an office object.

* Examine the sleek, white plastic Space-Tel telephone designed by Morison Cousins for Japan’s Atari-Tel Co. This classic of avant-garde stylishness has a beautifully unfussy shape and its multiple functions may be understood by the least technically minded office worker. It’s a pleasure to behold.

Good office design, the experts insist, is also good business.

In the globalization of the business world, with lightning communications technology and multinational corporations locked in intense competition, design offers an edge that can distinguish and advance a company, Rams says.

“The importance of design is increasing because industry is having an ever harder time defining product superiority in other respects,” says Rams. “The standard advantages of favorable pricing, technical efficiency and a high standard of quality are now almost universally equal among major manufacturers. It’s a neck-and-neck race for markets nowadays, and the only way to set yourself off . . . is by really good design.”

Many of the more enlightened manufacturers of office furnishings seem to agree.

Terry West, industrial design director for Steelcase Corp., says he sees designers as “integrators who create coherent environments to enhance the way we work in the office.”

Imaginative objects have a powerful effect--conscious or unconscious--on employees’ hours, West says. Something as basic as a comfortable, attractive chair can make a big difference in the way workers feel about the office.

Ironically, West sees the worship of technology as a prime enemy of good office design: “We are in danger of being overwhelmed by the pace of purely technological advances that serve the process, rather than the person. Engineers tend to consider the efficiency of office machines as an end in itself, but people have to use them in ways that encourage human, rather than mechanical, functions.”

For an example of technological convenience overwhelming human comfort, look at the design of the modern office building. With its open floor plan, sealed windows, centrally controlled heating and cooling and uniform lighting levels, the standard office is efficient.

But emotionally, it’s threatening. Workers can’t control their own space’s temperature; they can’t easily adjust the brightness of the light on their desks; they can’t find privacy; they can’t even stick their heads out the window to make contact with the outside world.

The result: Many office workers develop a feeling of claustrophobia, induced by their sense that they lack control.

“As offices become more automated, why shouldn’t workers recline on couches rather than be confined to stiff upright chairs?” asks architect Larry Lerner, who adds that in an age in which advances in telecommuting let more and more people work from home, designers should be working to lessen the disparity in the comfort and feel between offices and homes. But until couches become common in offices, many designers have put much imaginative energy into transforming the standard office chair.

The innovative “Equa” chair, created by Santa Monica designer Donald Chadwick for the Herman Miller Co., is an assemblage of gas cylinders, levers, linkages and Space Age materials that give the unit the look of an aircraft’s high speed ejector seat.

“In designing the Equa, we looked deeply into human body mechanics,” Chadwick says. “We explored the way people move as they work, and the dynamics of the chair’s response to the flexibility of that movement. Our aim is to make a seat that seems an extension of your body as you toil at your desk.”

The office of the future may, indeed, not have a desk at all, says designer Steve Diskin, principal with Mega-Erg, a privately funded, San Francisco-area think tank specializing in furniture systems.

“With the new generation of voice-recognition machines, you could wander around the room working wherever you like, on your back, on your bottom or on your feet,” he says. “The technology of offices must serve human comfort, not the other way around, and the quality of design as a humane aesthetic is crucial to making that happen.”

Some of the innovative concepts for office workstations, developed for Steelcase by advanced product design students at Art Center, reveal a tendency toward a kind of techno-anthropomorphism.

In this style, desks resemble perky robots that can follow workers around the room like high-tech pets recording everything they say while supplying them with data and companionship.

The central question for office designers, Rams insists, is: Are designers artists, or artists of the applied arts?

“The only answer can be (that) industrial design is a technology that has to be judged for its honesty, as well as its aesthetic qualities,” Rams says. “Good design is as little design as possible.”