More than a century later, Steelcase is an architecture, furniture, and technology products provider with 60,000 products and 20,000 finishes on offer. And a culture of innovation has remained core to the company since that first patented design.
The latest Steelcase design advance is a virtual one—a new innovation to help design, assemble, and market its products. “When you tell customers, ‘This is a small office, this is a small hallway, this is a big hallway,’ they have a really difficult time understanding the space,” says Steelcase’s Steve Goetzinger about traditional architecture plans.
As senior consulting applications engineer and resident innovator, Goetzinger gathered his team to solve that dilemma by designing a 3D space and bringing it to life using virtual reality (VR). Called Virtual Office Space (VOS), the system fosters the culture of experimentation and advancement that is baked into Steelcase’s DNA.
VOS started as what Goetzinger calls a “fairly flat” environment, but then his team began to experiment, gaining understanding of the functionality organically. “As we started to test, one of the things that we did right was, we started to iterate,” Goetzinger says. “So we started to add plants and people to understand how it would change the interaction.”