Product design: Be by Formway

Here's another one from the archives (ProDesign, issue 101). Form­way picked up last year's product design Stringer Award for Hum, it's desk sys­tem. (Actu­ally, last year a product Stringer, the top hon­our at the BeST Awards, was given to two com­pan­ies – Fisher & Paykel won the other for its Ozone Cook Sur­face). Formway's back at the BeST Awards this year with Be, a new task chair, which has already picked up a fair num­ber of awards, includ­ing a Gold Award at The Best of Neo­Con com­pet­i­tion in the States. Here's the story:

Re:Formation

Rede­fin­ing task seat­ing means answer­ing hard ques­tions that sit in the grey area between philo­sophy and product design. How do we work, how do we sit, how do we inter­act? 'Be' is the phys­ical mani­fest­a­tion of Formway's answers to those, and other, questions.

Story by Michael Barrett.

Be devel­op­ment shots. Top left: Kent Parker, Mark Pen­ning­ton and Ben­jamin Pardo. Other images: pro­to­type assembly and mater­ial testing.

I find the word task mildly bur­den­some. Guilty by asso­ci­ation, task seat­ing, as a descrip­tion, sounds equally oner­ous. There’s another prob­lem with the word task, aside from its mildly depress­ing defin­i­tion, and that’s its sin­gu­lar­ity. For many people, work isn’t one task, but a col­lec­tion of tasks; a series of inter­rup­tions, col­lab­or­a­tions and yes, sin­gu­lar moments too, all inter­spersed with the leg cross­ing, lean­ing, slouch­ing and fid­get­ing that most people sub­con­sciously go through in the search for the most com­fort­able pos­i­tion at any given moment.
This fact isn’t lost on Form­way, the Lower Hutt-based design­ers of work­place staples such as Life (the chair, that is, not the ori­gin of spe­cies) and Hum (the desk­ing sys­tem, not the noise issued by singing a word­less tone with your mouth closed). Formway’s latest pro­ject, launched on the world via Knoll at Neo­Con, the USA’s the largest exhib­i­tion of con­tract fur­nish­ings is another chair, a chair with a dif­fer­ence. It’s also a chair that seems to be receiv­ing noth­ing but rap­tur­ous reviews Stateside, and even more recently, a coveted Gold Award at Neo­Con, which bodes well for its recep­tion loc­ally, one imagines.

With Be, or Gen­er­a­tion as it will be mar­keted in the States, Form­way wanted to do more than tap into an exist­ing mar­ket seg­ment, it wanted to tap into an unreal­ised sec­tor – to an extent, that meant meet­ing the needs of people who didn’t know their needs weren’t being met. To do this, it took a long, hard look at how we work. To over­sim­plify the res­ults of many years research, one thing the com­pany dis­covered, blind­ingly obvi­ous in its sim­pli­city, is that, “we all sit differently”.

Be is a flex­ible chair, designed to meet any num­ber of sit­ting needs of the mod­ern user. These needs can be grouped into three cat­egor­ies, says Ed Burak, Formway’s gen­eral man­ager of mar­ket­ing, “indi­vidual, act­ive and inter­act­ive”. Be is a chair that nat­ur­ally flexes to assist the user to change pos­i­tion; its arm­rests are attached to the branch frame, free­ing up space for the users legs to swivel to the left and right; and per­haps most obvi­ously, it fea­tures a flex­ible back­rest that allows the back edge to roll, form­ing a ledge, for want of a bet­ter word, for lean­ing on that is designed to assist nat­ural col­lab­or­a­tion and encour­age the flow of inform­a­tion. Aside from this, Be is also a chair for a ded­ic­ated task (sin­gu­lar), and it’s a chair for all things in-between.

Be, designed by New Zea­l­and com­pany Form­way and licensed to Knoll.

When Kent Parker, lead designer on the pro­ject, says, “Be is not an iter­at­ive product”, he means that the new chair is not a vari­ation on a theme, or Life Mark II. “It’s an evol­u­tion of know­ledge and, with respect to Life, it cer­tainly is an exten­sion of the dynamic and flex­ing per­form­ance,” he says. “What is most import­ant and is not iter­at­ive about Be, is that the design’s found­a­tions are based on new research and insights into the chan­ging work­place – the under­stand­ing that we don’t just sit in the tra­di­tional task pos­tures, but move between dif­fer­ent work modes from ‘focus to col­lab­or­at­ive’ con­tinu­ously through­out the day.”

Burak says the ori­ginal one-dimensional view of task ergo­nom­ics, “the image of the stoic worker, head down, eyes front, back straight and shoulders square is all too well doc­u­mented and pro­moted as the accep­ted defin­i­tion of how we should be supported”.

“This sup­port is still crit­ical, but today our work­ing day is far less struc­tured, it com­bines dif­fer­ent degrees of com­mu­nic­a­tion, chaos, sin­gu­lar thought, reas­on­ing and expres­sion. We’re find­ing ourselves shift­ing often and almost seam­lessly from one work­ing state to another to another.
“Our three guid­ing prin­ciples were move­ment, com­fort and intu­ition,” he says. “This notion of intu­ition is what drives the sim­pli­city of design. We want our products to almost anti­cip­ate the require­ments of its user, without thought, without con­trol. In other words – users of our products have bet­ter things to do than fig­ure out how to manip­u­late his/her chair in order to work more effect­ively or more comfortably.”

The shift­ing state, described as “trans-postural and trans-activity” by Ben­jamin Pardo, Knoll’s dir­ector of design and senior vice pres­id­ent, over the phone from New York, is the essence of Be, and one of the factors related to the chan­ging face of the office that inter­ested Knoll in the chair. Another factor that excited Pardo, “as a Knoll guy”, was the use of new mater­i­als. His­tor­ic­ally, Knoll is a com­pany that has encour­aged the invent­ive use of mater­i­als: Mar­cel Breuer’s use of tubu­lar steel, Eero Saarinen’s use of fibre­glass, Harry Bertoia’s use of steel wire and Frank Gehry’s bent wood con­struc­tions come to mind. Form­way is in esteemed com­pany to be asso­ci­ated with that pan­theon of design greats. Per­haps as such, Pardo is firm on his expect­a­tions of design­ers, but praises Form­ways abil­it­ies: “There’s a great clar­ity in terms of con­ver­sa­tion asso­ci­ated with brief, research asso­ci­ated with it, set­ting of envir­on­mental goals, the choice of mater­i­als, all of those ques­tions. It’s very clear that you can march from point A-to-B in the vari­ous goals. Form­way do a won­der­ful job with that. In fact, that would be my expect­a­tion of them and every­body else.”

Be in action.

As lead designer Kent Parker says, Form­way looked at new mater­ial tech­no­lo­gies and built con­cepts around them. But, it wasn’t a ran­dom search – para­met­ers were set around per­form­ance, cost, envir­on­mental per­form­ance, abil­ity to get to mar­ket and com­mer­cial­isa­tion. The choice of mater­i­als was import­ant as, because of the chair’s flex­ib­il­ity, the mater­i­als do the work. Inter­est­ingly, much of the chair is com­prised of the same fam­ily of “elastic poly­meric mater­ial” (see below), chosen for strength and elasticity.

What is as equally inter­est­ing as the design pro­cess is the design philo­sophy that spawned it; the thoughts on the office of the future, how we work and how we might work. From his pos­i­tion at the head of a large, design-orientated fur­niture com­pany, Pardo has some use­ful insights, many expressed through his account of why Knoll chose the name Generation.

“Let’s just say that it’s an exhaust­ive pro­cess … I think we iden­ti­fied with the name for because it talked about next gen­er­a­tion office seat­ing for a new gen­er­a­tion of people. I also iden­ti­fied with the word, I liked the let­ters, and I liked the num­ber of let­ters, and what they imply graph­ic­ally and how they can be set, to use a very old term, they kern well and they do all of those things and there’s good visual impact, so I think that all of those factors are sig­ni­fic­ant. I think that it’s very much in tune with the lan­guage of the time, products of the time and it relates to the people.” Addi­tion­ally, spe­cific­ally relat­ing to gen­er­a­tion, Pardo believes that while today we have very young people work­ing with older people, “we’re also mov­ing into a period where there are fewer younger people”.

“So the gen­er­a­tional ques­tion to me is one of reten­tion. There are only so many people who are really good so the oppor­tun­ity to retain is very import­ant. Even more import­ant than that, you need to put people in an envir­on­ment where they can work and col­lab­or­ate and per­form in such a way that they’re used to and can have an impact on cor­por­ate culture.”

Q+A – Form­way:

ProDesign: What does win­ning a gold medal at Neo­Con mean to Form­way?
Ed Burak, Formway's gen­eral man­ager, mar­ket­ing: This is bril­liant news, and a huge deal in the US – Knoll will be stoked, as we are. This will cement our status as a ser­i­ous global player in the design stu­dio stakes, fol­low­ing on from the Gold we won with the Life Chair about seven years ago.
ProDesign: When did you recog­nise that people needed a ‘bet­ter’ seat­ing sys­tem that let them turn and lean?
Kent Parker, lead designer: Charles Eames said, “The recog­ni­tion and under­stand­ing of the need is the primary con­di­tion of the cre­at­ive act". This quote is rel­ev­ant to many of Formway’s "new-to-the-world pro­jects", includ­ing Be. Recog­ni­tion came with hun­dreds of hours of Voice of the Cus­tomer (VOC) inter­view­ing and obser­va­tional research. In par­tic­u­lar, it came dur­ing an inter­view with a cor­por­ate PA who assumed everything but what we would describe as a stand­ard pos­ture dur­ing a 40-minute con­ver­sa­tion. So, these ques­tions arose for us: ‘Why does she take these pos­tures when she knows what the pre­scribed pos­tures are?’; ‘When does she take them?’; ‘does every­one do this?’; and ‘is it good or bad?’. Under­stand­ing of these ques­tions provided the found­a­tion for Be.
ProDesign: Tell me about the chair's Flex­Top sys­tem?
KP: Flex­Top offers the bene­fits of a low back chair, with a com­fort­able ledge to rest on when relax­ing or com­mu­nic­at­ing. The back sup­port uses new struc­tures and mater­i­als for unique per­form­ance. Its stature and skin rearranges itself seam­lessly to sup­port the wide range of pos­tures users take through­out the day. The Flex­Top gives com­fort­able shoulder sup­port while facing for­ward in upright task and reclined pos­tures, but folds over without adjust­ment to act as a com­fort­able arm­rest when side sit­ting. Flex­Back skin is made of an advanced elast­o­meric poly­mer that is manip­u­lated to provide a highly com­pli­ant, sup­port­ive and breath­able sur­face that adapts to the shape of your body.
ProDesign: What are the bene­fits of the chair's skin?
Paul Wilkin­son, senior design engin­eer: We researched new mater­i­als for six months, look­ing for some­thing that could provide new per­form­ance. The skin is made from an elastic poly­meric mater­ial that can be manip­u­lated to provide a unique com­bin­a­tion of strength, tough­ness and elasti­city. Form­way had to develop a pat­en­ted pro­cess to pro­duce it, and the res­ult­ing sur­face is strong, tough, UV-stable and wear-resistant. It provides a new level of supple sup­port, com­pli­ance and flex­ib­il­ity.
ProDesign: Many com­pon­ents are made from the same type of poly­mer. What is it, and what are the bene­fits of this mater­ial?
PW: The major­ity of the struc­tural com­pon­ents of the chair, such as the seat and back frame, are moul­ded from PBT. This mater­ial is in the same fam­ily as the skin and flex­ing ele­ments within the recline mech­an­ism and has sev­eral bene­fits: it allows com­pon­ents to be moul­ded together provid­ing strong con­nec­tions without the need for fix­ings; there is avail­able a renew­ably sourced ver­sion of this mater­ial; it reduces the num­ber of types of poly­mer in the chair which reduces the dis­as­sembly required at end of life.

Be's flex­ib­il­ity put to the test.

Sketches from the design process.

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