Workplace design reflects our changing relationship with work and society

According to JG Ballard who dedicated a lifetime to understanding our relationship with the world around us: ‘furniture constitutes an external constellation of our skin areas and body postures’.

Whether he would have recognised it as such, Ballard was a pioneer of the principle that we now refer to as psychogeography; defined by one of its founders Guy Debord as ‘the study of the precise effects of setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual’. It may have originally been about the manipulation of the aesthetic and political as part of the Situationist movement of the 1950s, but the idea certainly has a modish appeal in the light of our ongoing fascination with the relationship between people and workplaces. The design of the physical environment to make us comfortable, send messages to others or enhance our well-being and mood is a recurrent theme in both the domestic and commercial design press.

The past few years have seen a surge of interest in the role furniture and the rest of our working environment has in making us feel better, physically, intellectually and emotionally. The case has become very sophisticated indeed, shifting way beyond the prescriptive and one dimensional needs of legislation. The new quest is for wellbeing and a return on investment; something rather more attractive and complex than a desire to merely avoid injury and litigation. In its attempt to meet this new demand, the furniture has once again highlighted its tendency to reflect the concerns of firms and the latest generation of employees.

To paraphrase Ballard, office furniture forms the external constellation of the shape of the organisation and a reflection of its self-image. The design of offices, the furniture that fills them and even the shape of the market matters because of what it tells us about how we work, how organisations function and even what is happening in the economy. If you want to know what’s going on, take a look at the places we work and the things with which we surround ourselves. This, we believe, is now the main driver of change in the way we design the workplace.