[Photo: courtesy Barber Osgerby]
Apple design chief Jony Ive keeps a low profile, but he’s social with a handful of Brits who sit atop the world of industrial design, including Jay Barber and Ed Osgerby, founders of the studio Barber Osgerby. A few years ago, the duo paid Ive a visit. Over a pint, they shared what they had been working on: a new office chair that would be the first from the furniture maker Vitra in several years. The pitch around the design wasn’t that it was technical or flashy. Rather, the idea was that it was “quiet,” with soothing curves that could blend in anywhere, even a home. Ive perked up, raised an eyebrow, and said, “That’s interesting.” Several months later, Apple became the first customer for the Pacific Chair, which it ordered for every work station in its 12,000-person campus designed by Foster + Partners.
Barber Osgerby’s idea for a calm office chair was, of course, catnip for Ive, who has strived to make Apple’s design so simple as to seem “inevitable.” But even more than that, the calm office chair was a reflection of a paradigmatic shift in our attitudes toward work. The Pacific Chair is meant to blend in with and defer to an interior design, in a way that office chairs almost never do. Compare it to the Aeron Chair, which came out in 1994 and looks the exact opposite of calm, and you get a microcosm of how radically our ideals about work have changed in the past three decades.
In the 1990s, we still assumed that your best work was done at your desk, so you needed a machine heavily engineered for your comfort. That was the Aeron: a machine whose exoskeleton was meant to conform to your own, so that you could sit for hours on end in supreme comfort. Today, you may have noticed, the prevailing ideal is that you spend most of your day collaborating with other people, that meetings and conference calls are the center of the workday. What quiet time you do have is spent wherever suits your mood.
“Younger generations are spending a lot of time at work, so we’re trying to create a residential vibe,” says Primo Orpilla, founder of Office O+A, which has designed interiors for tech giants ranging from Uber to Microsoft. “The blurring of work and life is at an all-time high. For younger generations, work represents who they know and how they socialize.”
Moreover, there’s a sense in which offices are being designed to flatter the way that millennial workers would like to see themselves: Not as office drones, but creative types with side hustles and Instagram followers. The offices that companies aspire to, says Orpilla, are those that look creative and make workers feel like they’re part of a creative organization. “People have their own Pinterest pages and personal brands,” he adds. “We’re creating this backdrop for making them feel like creators themselves.” #Influencers don’t clock in. They make #impact from the throne of a lounge chair, not the confines of a cubicle.