“It’s both and,” says Joseph White of the open-versus-closed debate that has dominated conversations about the workspace since, seemingly, time immemorial. (Though in actuality, it’s just been going on for a few years.) As Director of Workplace Strategy, Design, and Management at Herman Miller, he believes in the idea of purposeful variety, a practical concept developed over decades across the organization’s many disciplines—and formalized now as a key concept within what Herman Miller calls Living Office®. Purposeful variety runs across all variables—from furniture selection to color to organization to layout—and at its core is a deep and profound understanding of how people in the workplace operate, and what they need.

A timeline: First, in the 1960s, there was the corner office and rows of desks. (Think Mad Men). Then, in the 1980s, there were standardized cubicles with salespeople screaming at each other (Think The Wolf of Wall Street). And then in the late 1990s and early 2000s came the advent of the open office. (Think The Intern, in which retiree Robert DeNiro comes to work in Anne Hathaway’s adaptively reused brick warehouse). The arguments, as played out in the pages of The New Yorker, Harvard Business Review, and more: the workplace needs democracy and to create democracy we need openness; the workplace needs privacy and to create privacy we need walls and doors; the workplace needs a blend of both; the workplace shouldn’t even exist; the workplace absolutely should exist. The debate often led back to a few evergreen ideas; chief among them, serendipity as a driver of innovation—often exemplified by the iconic story about Steve Jobs requesting a single pair of bathrooms for the entire company be installed in the Pixar atrium so that everyone would be forced to run into each other. Pixar did end up with more than one set of restrooms, but it was Jobs’s idea of serendipity that took major hold......Continue Reading

Top image: Artwork by Elena Boils, courtesy of Herman Miller

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