Here’s an interesting exercise you may want to try. Off the top of your head and without thinking about it too much, write down the names of five iconic office furniture designs. The kind that your Aunt Sheila might recognise if she saw them but wouldn’t necessarily be able to name. When I did this recently while writing a piece about design trends, the products I came up with automatically were things like Frank Lloyd Wright’s desks for the Larkin building, Action Office, the 3107 chair (pictured), and Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair.
The striking thing was that the last indisputably iconic product I came up with was the Aeron, and that was launched in 1994. There were some excellent products on the list after that date, but they haven’t become icons and almost certainly never will. It is a characteristic of a true icon that it can communicate with people beyond the trade. Even those people most oblivious or blind to the charms of office furniture design know the 3107 as the Christine Keeler chair
What is noticeable about each of the products in my own list is that not only are they recognisable to the non-deskhead part of the population, not only have they endured aesthetically, functionally and so commercially over many years, they all have opened doors to a new way of thinking and all reflected something essential about the way the world was changing at the time they were launched. There was often a movement behind them.
In effect they were a response to various forces that created the evolutionary pressures necessary for their birth. So, you would assume that given the extraordinary developments in the way we work over the past few years and the greater knowledge we have that we would have seen the emergence of ideas that were equally seminal and astonishing.
Yet we’ve seen very little in the way of iconic ideas for some time now. We had benching, which was interesting to a large extent and certainly of its time, but never really made it as an icon of design and never will precisely because it is so purely functional. We’ve seen height adjustable desks. We’ve seen a whole generation of pods, booths, rooms and baffles to shut out the din and sight of colleagues. We’ve seen the most amazing dynamic mechanisms applied to chairs, first with a whole array of controls and now more commonly just one or two.