Herman Miller Public Office Landscape

Based on the belief that the more people connect, the better they work, Public transforms every part of the office—including individual desks—into places for collaboration. It’s the first office system to support casual work and to provide comfort at the desk, in circulation spaces, and in group areas—all within a consistent design vocabulary. Visually uniform and modular surfaces, storage, and seating can be configured into a broad range of settings that encourage fluid transitions between collaborative and focused work. We believe collaboration isn’t exclusive to conference rooms or desks; it happens everywhere. Public was designed to support fluid interactions and spontaneous conversations across the entire landscape, keeping the office in a state of flow, where people are engaged, focused, and able to move freely between collaborative and individual modes of work.With a modular kit of parts, Public enables people to work how and where they want. Casual group areas become destinations for brainstorming, teamwork, presentations, and meetings. Individual workspaces facilitate sharing and interaction, or productivity and privacy. Public elements can be arranged into configurations that express culture and foster belonging—and that can evolve as needs change. Layers of color and material create visual consistency and enhance the flow of movement from individual to group activities, and from private to shared spaces. The Social Chair is the core component of the Public system. It brings a new level of ergonomics and functionality to soft seating by accommodating a range of people and postures as they work. The chair encourages the purposeful interactions that drive work—at the desk, in group areas, and throughout the entire office. Both literally and figuratively, the Social Chair is designed for connection. Its open, inviting shape encourages people to sit and interact, while its top surface seamlessly links to desks, storage units, and other Social Chairs. Public’s highly versatile elements can be reconfigured as your organization grows and evolves, eliminating the need to acquire a new system and dispose of the old. This makes good sense for both the environment and your bottom line. Public’s carefully considered sustainable design uses the least possible materials, including 100 percent recyclable steel components. The Social Chair’s seat, made from expanded polypropylene, is lightweight, highly recyclable, and comprised of a minimal amount of foam

Design Story Understanding the importance of collaboration in the workplace and knowing that it happens most often at the desk, Yves Béhar and his team at fuseproject began investigating solutions that would merge casual parts of the office environment with spaces where people work, evenly spreading collaborative zones throughout the floorplan. As a starting point, the team explored solutions that would bring a new level of ergonomics to casual and group seating. Béhar’s concept proposed collaborative areas in close proximity to and as a part of individual workspaces. The design would encourage the type of productive interaction that drives organizations forward. During the development process, Béhar tested prototypes at the fuseproject office in San Francisco. He and his team worked among the evolving design for 18 months and used their experiences to inform and refine the concept.