Author: Om Malik

[topic]Architecture as Art[/topic]

Om: Tell me a little bit about yourself. Have you always been fascinated by buildings?

Jennifer: I don’t know where that started, but I know it’s been there for most of my life. I was fortunate enough to spend many years in Europe, specifically in Italy, when I was a kid. It was difficult not to be enamored with these incredible structures, most of which, in Italy, are churches or historical structures which have in many ways withstood the test of time. Some of these structures are feats of engineering in their own right: incredible cathedrals, truly massive domes. Others are ordinary places where you would imagine people spent their lives. They lived in these places, they potentially worked there or they had their own business, or in some cases we’re even talking about humble places where people worshiped.

I was one of these curious kids who used to take things apart: My dad’s television or any gadget in the house was fair game. I saw buildings as interesting engineering systems, without knowing the word for “engineering.” What always fascinated me is that these buildings — it’s a lot more than the engineering systems. The ones that are awe-inspiring, the ones that withstand the test of time, are able to capture a collective expression of a time.

Buildings are different than other forms of cultural production. They’re different than art. Two-dimensional art, for example, or sculpture or music, even. The reason they are different is we live our lives in them. We live in these environments.

My interest has led me to understand this expression in the 21st century, where, for most of our lives, we live in digital space. The world is changing to create the basic building blocks of a digital society, which means that many of the things that shape our lives — our memories, our pasts, the way we connect with others, the way we create new ideas, the way we are inspired and sometimes the way we learn new things — doesn’t only happen by walking through the physical world. It also often happens by interacting with the digital world.

We are in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, and we are at the beginning of understanding this physical digital convergence as it impacts buildings and design.

Om: We had an agricultural-based economy for a long time, and then industrialization happened and we had an industrial economy. Between those two big movements, what have you observed in various buildings and how they reflect those eras?

Jennifer: You have a macroeconomic driver that brings a new technology into the world. Society organizes itself to introduce that technology and that capability into other aspects of daily life, whether it’s by building infrastructure or by developing services or products that leverage that infrastructure. And after that, something happens that begins to organize the way people work in that context. Often the spaces are direct reflections of the way people need to work.

To make an easy example, take the United States after the war [World War II]. You had an emergence of white-collar workers and the need for people to develop knowledge. That effectively also produced quite a lot of paper: Paper was how people communicated, decisions were made, things were recorded. At the same time you had a development where the technical structure of the building itself would allow for large, open plans.

The convergence of these two contexts, where workers were shifting from the plants and the factories into the office and buildings were able to now open up large floor plans for space allocation — the technology emerged to serve that context. That is what we call the cubicle, or systems furniture. It was a tool to allow people to literally move through space in an organized way by creating hallways, corridors and clusters of people. Also to allow individual workers to organize their work, which at that time had to do with typing machines and eventually telephones.

I’m always asking, What are those key technologies that change, that cater to this new emergent need that then is addressed by a design solution or an architectural solution? This is only one of the more recent cycles in history.

[topic]Sweatshops to Startups [/topic]

Om: In the Garment District, garment factories, essentially sweatshops, are now being converted into startup labs. It’s ironic that those places are now being retrofitted for a whole new generation of companies and workspaces. Sometimes everything comes full circle, doesn’t it?

Jennifer: Yeah, it’s interesting. There is an aesthetic sensibility that the startup community connects with when it comes to those spaces. I don’t necessarily think that there is a connection to the activities that happen in those spaces, but there is something that’s appealing. You can see that also in Detroit and Chicago, an attraction toward these older buildings that create loft-type environments as they’re marketed but are effectively large buildings with high spatial volumes with a lot of light. Because the buildings were industrial by nature, they’re also designed in a way that’s honest in terms of most of their systems — for example, the electrical and fire protections systems are exposed.

That type of transparency is well aligned with the values of our generation, which aspires to have systems that are designed for transparency, openness, sharing, co-creation. I don’t think there is ever a conscious connection to those expressions. It’s more subconscious. Spaces and buildings have the ability to communicate certain qualities, which we then experience when we inhabit them.

Om: Do you believe we are at the end of the cubicle era? Can you elaborate on that and how it relates to this emerging digital economy?

Jennifer: The technical name for the cubicle is “systems furniture.” It was developed in 1968 as a modular tool that would allow a worker to have, ergonomically, a sound way of organizing their work as well as their day. As I mentioned, it was the tool that allowed organizations to organize their workforce as well as their spaces, their real estate assets.

I don’t prophesy the end of the cubicle in itself. That will play itself out based on larger commercial forces. But the last decade suggests we work in a different way, because we interact with each other in a different way. We do that in a digital space, the very way in which we construct new knowledge. We create new ideas. We learn about new things. We connect with each other for professional or personal reasons or for simply gaining new information or data, and it happens in the digital space. Those types of interactions and that type of user experience bear a certain design DNA. As users, we choose physical environments that support our digital work.

In my work, I don’t focus that much on the end of the recording itself but on the effects of programmability. By definition, a digital environment is programmable. That effect demands a different set of performance requirements in the physical space.

[topic]Programmable Workspaces [/topic]

Om: What do you mean by “programmable”? I have a different idea of programmable, which is network-centric and software-centric. Are you saying “programmable” as in there is no permanent desk space for workers or the office adapts to the needs of the moment?

Jennifer: This notion of programmability is derived from computer science language. Originally, the notion of programmability was from an R&D perspective. In R&D at Herman Miller, we worked on this notion, What is it about the way in which digital space is constructed that is applicable to the physical environment? The spaces that we are working with need to be designed for a different set of performance attributes.

The change in workspaces is driven by networks — wireless, wired and social networks, which have transformed society in the last decade. There is now a lot more complexity in how we design workspaces. We need to find ways to integrate information and data systems with people to create sophisticated interactions between humans and machines. These requirements were not present even 10 years ago, but they are now normal.

Om: Are there best practices for this new world? What should a young startup be thinking about in terms of an office?

[topic]New Office Space [/topic]

Jennifer: The best practices are emerging from the world of coworking spaces, hacker spaces, maker spaces — environments that are designed around core principles of openness, sharing and co-creation.

Those types of environments create a wide variety of rooms for group interaction. They have building blocks of space that are specific to either one-on-one interaction or small-group interaction or large interaction, and all of them have the ability to connect to your data in a way that’s more social and more public. The environments themselves are informal in terms of the culture of the space. Most young startup environments are simply focused on the activity itself, the bandwidth and the ability to connect to the network.

Another layer that is new is the role of community manager. It came from online communities, but it didn’t exist in the world of office spaces. There wasn’t a job description. To some degree, for larger corporations, there still isn’t. But there is a new role that emerges in these contexts. The person becomes the linchpin of an environment, and their role is to curate physical interactions as well as the digital conversations of the community with the purpose of accelerating productivity, learning, engagement, the things that are important for that startup at that time.

Om: Are there any new office furniture companies that cater to this environment? There is an opportunity to create new furniture and new accessories, don’t you think?

Jennifer: Yes, for sure. There are companies or even products that have been designed for this new type of worker, the startup mobile worker of the 21st century, who is constantly connected and mobile.

We used to define “work” by crossing the threshold of a physical building that we called “the office.” Once we did that, we entered into this mindset that we were at work, and we were doing work. Today that same passage happens when we connect to our work-related data on our smartphones or other tools.

Our cities can be seen as a workplace, especially in urban cores, where you have a workforce that’s a lot more mobile and a higher concentration of startup and technology workers. But I don’t think it’s only a city phenomenon. It’s more of a structural shift in the world of work. People are beginning to look at environments that would not be traditionally considered workspaces, like hotel lobbies. The Ace Hotel in New York, for example.

Or even real estate developers are beginning to reinvent, in their residential buildings, entire floors dedicated to shared workspaces. Older buildings are being readapted as startup clusters of incubators. Workers choose where to work based on their specific needs at a much higher rate than they could before. Now, that doesn’t mean people do that every day of the week, but it certainly is more of an option.

The products are very much emerging that are addressing this new world of work, and they are different expressions of space that all of a sudden we can transform into a workspace, in real space and real time, as long as we’re connected to our digital workspace.

Om: What do you think of the development of a concept like WeWork from a wider cultural perspective?

Jennifer: WeWork and coworking in general point to a deep structural shift in work culture, characterized mainly by two elements: a consumerization of the workplace and the emergence of a new set of values around work and the office that are more aligned with the 21st century worker. Workspaces that can deliver on both of these elements resonate greatly with today’s work culture.

Historically, workspaces were designed to communicate hierarchy, confidentiality and organizational structure. The design DNA of spaces like WeWork and others resonates instead with net­ culture and is built on values like openness, sharing and co­creation. The work experience is organized to communicate and reinforce these shared values and, in successful cases, this is achieved at scale, operating almost as a “work platform” that supports a wide range of companies of different sizes and across multiple industries.

Om: Do you think we will see some of WeWork’s design concepts translate into the wider workplace?

Jennifer: Yes, in some ways it’s already happening. The innovation in the real estate business model (e.g., shorter lease terms, new contracts and insurance terms) and the corollary innovations in the way spaces like WeWork have to be designed and managed (e.g., formalized community manager roles in the office, distributed amenity spaces for all) are an appropriate response to a culture of work that is changing.

In the last few years, design professionals and manufacturers within the commercial-office-interiors industry have been exploring how to integrate elements of coworking into more-conventional corporate workspaces. This has taken many forms, including new furniture and product lines and different approaches to planning, as well as some new services inspired by the way early coworking communities used apps to optimize their work experience. Considering the relatively small total square footage of coworking spaces versus more-traditional workspaces globally, or even the relatively small number of coworkers, this level of interest is significant.

From an interior design perspective, WeWork in particular has a distinctive feel. One of its signature design elements is the use of demountable clear glass walls with black frames to divide members’ offices. This simple functional move allows WeWork to easily reconfigure the office layouts as the customer’s needs for space or location change. Most importantly, however, it allows light to pass through most interior spaces, giving occupants auditory privacy inside their own offices while creating the shared visual effect of sitting in a large, open ­— and busy! ­— community workspace. Another consistent design element is the informal but high­-end styling of the workspaces through a broad mix of design pieces, be they furniture, wallpaper styles or decorative elements, all curated with great attention to detail to create a lively yet professional setting.

These elements of the design concept are easy to replicate or reproduce. More difficult to replicate, however, and in my opinion more unique to the WeWork experience, is its speed and focus on experimentation. In practical terms, WeWork’s ability to interpret and quickly package through space or services what startup culture or small businesses need from a workspace or a work community (i.e., product and membership offerings) has been key to its appeal and growth.

Examples are combinations of access to different types of environments and fellow community members and services that support a range of needs for different stages of growth,­ from simply designed phone booths to elegantly furnished community spaces to talent or skill search and recruitment to client-facing event spaces to honesty markets to purchasing healthy snacks through the app to discounts to HR and group health benefits. All of these are possible and relevant once a certain scale is reached, and they should be seen less as features of a new kind of office concept (although they are) and more as live experiments into a rapidly evolving workspace model that reflects what users need most:­ constant learning and flexibility to manage constant change.

[topic]Workspace Is Social [/topic]

Om: Is the economic reality of smaller businesses that can be scaled with technology going to have an impact on how we view the office?

Jennifer: Physical space plays a significant role in staging the conditions for learning, collaboration and building a shared culture. This is unlikely to change in the near future, but it’s easy to see how the design requirements for offices are evolving.

If we look at images of offices in the 1950s and 1960s, what they reveal about the office is quite interesting. Echoing the layout of factory floors and the management principles of the time, the production of information in the office, a task achieved largely through paper, was structured in a linear fashion. All of these factors contributed to a model of the office that effectively lasted for decades.

Much is different now. Most workers are mobile, they organize themselves as networks, and the production of information along with most companies’ shared knowledge is digital. However, one similarity remains: The office is changing, because the nature of the problems that are solved in it is changing.

From a design perspective, a workspace is a social and technical system that can serve several needs for a company. One of its most important functions is to stage how people collaborate to create value. In my work, I see two specific and generalizable needs for which physical space is crucial: One relates to speed and scaling, the other to how teams approach complex problem-solving. Both variables are key to how we perceive and therefore design the office.

The first space variable relates to the scenario you mention. For example, in a startup or small business context, knowledge-sharing and acceleration are important team dynamics for scaling. Spaces are designed to emphasize socialization, ­fostering “collisions” between people and creating interactions that increase learning and convey energy and, ideally, optimism. This happens through a specific design approach as well as the operations and management of the space. (Background music in shared areas, office tours with prospective members, meetups and social events after hours are not uncommon occurrences.)

Until recently, this kind of energy was seen in few work contexts, notably in Silicon Valley offices circa 15 years ago. In most other contexts, an office constituted a necessary operational expense, often a long-term sunk cost. Today many workers and companies can choose a “workspace product or package” based on what kind of value it will provide them. Once all the practical aspects linked with managing an office facility are removed — like scheduling cleaning services, restocking printers, upgrading Wi-Fi — the choice of workspace becomes a more nuanced decision, and, thanks to monthly membership terms, arguably a lower risk.

Many recent graduates, particularly those working in technology ventures, perceive the workspace as something that can change fast ­or is changed ­as a team grows, with relatively little investment by a company. For many of them, scaling the business is de­coupled from increasing the size of the workspace. Once a company reaches a certain scale in terms of physically co­located employees, they may “graduate” to a dedicated office,­ sometimes a different address altogether. This way of perceiving the office would not have been possible a few years ago. Now it is simply a reality.

Om: What are the social implications of working wherever we are? Not at the technology level, but at a more human level. How does this impact the whole society? It’s like, if you’re working everywhere, when are we social? When are we enjoying our families or relationships?

Jennifer: It’s a time of profound transformation, and I agree with you: Those are the important questions.

We create our own structures and our own social norms. For example, we know how this will work with technology, how it’s acceptable in the social media space to be connected to people that are your colleagues at work as well as your family and friends. They’re convergent. They’re all in the same space, and it’s all the same experience. Similar types of adaptations are going to happen, even how we organize our time, as well as how we organize our workspaces in our cities.

There is an opportunity to redefine many things as well as to recapture certain values and certain things that are potentially important for people. I don’t see that the future is going to be a place where we are constantly working and we’re constantly connected and we are losing our sense of self or our sense of our family values or our connections. But I believe we are redefining the richness of those, and the place that they have in our lives.

Related and Recommended Links:

1. 1. Fuseproject’s Herman Miller public page, where you can check out the new collaboration-centric office furniture and design
2. 2. “Away from My Desk” by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
3. 3. “Innovating in the Workspace” by Jennifer Magnolfi, Fast Company
4. 4. “Is This the Office of the Future or a $5 Billion Waste of Space” by Andrew Rice, Bloomberg BusinessWeek
5. 5. “Living in the DisneyLand Version of Startup Life” by Nitasha Tiku, BuzzFeed News

What Is Connectedness?

Om Malik: Recently I heard a talk by industrial designer Sam Hecht, and my big takeaway was that all of these industrial designers are still designing products from the user experience standpoint, but none of them are thinking about connectedness.

Yves Béhar: For me, whether I look at a non‑connected product or a connected product, they’re always connected, but they’re connected to the human experience. There are no electronics except for quartz movement in this new watch or the furniture system for Herman Miller: They are highly connected to what people want to do emotionally. They’re highly connected to those pent-up desires.

The connectedness can be technological or otherwise. But most importantly, that connectedness has to be what design preoccupies itself with: the human experience. Technology preoccupies itself too much with speed, with efficiency, with features. But design preoccupies itself with the human experience.

Om: Now we as a society are increasingly used to speed and being connected all the time. To think about design without that thing in the back of your mind, I would say that is half the experience, not the full experience.

For example, when I looked at Nest, it felt like a complete product. But the minute it didn’t work as effectively by being connected, it lost some of its beauty. That is becoming a reality now, especially as more and more things have chips in them. What’s to say that this new watch doesn’t become a smart watch? The quartz could be replaced with a chip.

A Watch Is Not Just a Watch

Yves: The idea behind this watch is to draw you into it. A problem with a lot of analog watches but also digital watches today is they keep you at the surface. It is always about the typography. It’s about the brand expression. It’s about digital functionality. But there’s nothing that gets your eye to go inside it.

You have to get a mechanical watch to get into it. That’s why people love to look on the back of their mechanical watches. But how can you draw the eye into the experience or the product? To me, that’s what good design is about. It draws you into itself for itself’s sake, not because it’s just connected. Sometimes objects that are connected push you out of that. It’s all about that connectedness. It’s not about what they actually do and perform for you.

Om: You’ve been designing watches for quite some time. How has the evolution of thinking behind a watch changed in 15 years?

Yves: When I worked on the Mini Motion watch, I was all about the digital display. Specifically, I was interested in the ability of a display to switch from horizontal to vertical, to give you a choice. It was the first display that switched directions. It cost us nothing, because it was purely graphic design. We programmed the numbers within the display to be about the same proportion, and then we just allowed with one button to turn it. Of course, we wanted it to be motion sensitive, but that was in 2002. We couldn’t do that then.

But I was really interested in the digital interface and giving the digital interface intelligence or adaptability to a user’s needs. The other thing I was interested in is, How do you put a watch on without a strap? With the Mini watch you just slapped it on. It became the starting point of how we built the first Jawbone bracelet, the Up and the Up2. It was a complete invention of how to do it.

The first [MiniMotion] watch was invention. The second [MiniMotion] watch was metaphor or idea. Then the idea for Issey Miyake was, it has to be Japanese from a brain-neuron standpoint. They have to go, “Ahhhhh!” They have to make that sound when they see it. It has to tap into the Zen part or the cultural part of Issey Miyake’s brand, which is always about discovery and material invention. He’s more of an industrialist. He designs the machines and extrapolates what could be done out of a new material, a new machine that folds or presses that material.

What I thought about is, which was nearly impossible, “What about if the only number I need is a number that is now? If it’s 6 o’clock, the only number I need on a watch is the 6 o’clock number. I don’t need the other ones. The other ones are useless. And at 7 o’clock I only need the 7 o’clock one.” We devised a way for the numbers to appear and disappear as time passes.

It was also metaphysical, because it was about communicating the passage of time and making people realize that 3 o’clock is going away and now 4 o’clock is coming on. It had this passage of time movement to it.

That was the second watch. The third watch is about depth and three‑dimensionality and a nod to a modernist icon of the 20th century.

Time Is Invisible

Om: One of things that I like about this watch, especially the black one, is that you can tell who makes it. It has that look that makes you say it must be Movado. Especially just the time face, and not the chronographs.

Yves: The one element that I really loved from the original watch, the Nathan George Horwitz design from 1947, is the metaphor of the sundial, or the “Museum Watch” as it’s called, which is the sun at 12 o’clock. But I felt that the icon would be stronger if it was being applied as a flat piece within the watch against a three-dimensional surface. A part of just a surface that communicates everything. It communicates the time. It has little ridges to tell you time. It communicates light and the way light changes as you move it around, and it has reflectivity and movement. At the same time it has a little bit of that branded element. But all within a single surface.

In design you try to do a lot with a few elements. But look at how many elements are inside your [IWC] watch. There’s 50 separate little things that are applied in different ways that are machined and sculpted and turned into a design.

In this new Movado watch there is a single element, and it’s supposed to do everything. It’s supposed to do the emotional side, the sculptural side, the branded side and the whole aesthetic. Inside this watch, you picked a white one versus a black one versus a blue one. With one part how much could we do, how much could we express?

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Om: Some of the watches you’ve designed seem more in tune with the commercial needs of the brand. But this one is pure you. It’s beautiful.

Yves: That’s why I was excited about this project. It was an opportunity for me to return to a simpler time, if I may say so. I was cramming batteries and sensors into the smallest possible space and beating engineers up all day long so that something beautiful could emerge out of the mess and the complexity that technology brings to our lives. In a way, it’s the opportunity to be pure and just think about the most emotionally primal elements. How do we assemble them all together?

Om: There’s no branding on this watch. How does a company that spends millions of dollars every year on branding say, “OK. We’re not going to put our name on it”?

Yves: We made all the prototypes, just to explore the shapes, without thinking about the size of the “Swiss Made” or the size of the “Movado,” because to me that’s the thing you do almost at the end. Then when the CEO and I looked at the final prototypes, he was really emotional about it. We didn’t even really discuss it. I didn’t know if I had permission to not put the name on it. I thought maybe legally you have to put the brand name on the face, or “Swiss Made.”

I just said, “It looks so beautiful. It almost doesn’t need anything else.” He was like, “Oh, yeah. We don’t need to put the brand on there. We can put it on the back.”

I was like, “Really? We can do that?” It was a fun moment, where it felt like two kids doing a misdeed. [laughs]

Om: Are watches your favorite things to design?

Yves: It’s hard. I don’t know. I like to design things that people use every day. I like to design things that are not once a month or once a week but to design things that you have to live with. That’s why the Jawbones — it’s always something that I felt passionate about. There are a few products like that, things that you’re going to be wearing every day, feeling good about every day.

The Process

Om: How did you design this watch? How did you go from meeting the CEO of Movado to where it is today?

Yves: We spent a few months agreeing on how we were going to do it. They hadn’t worked with an outside person, an industrial designer, since, really, that famous watch in 1947. We had to figure out how we were going to do this together, because it has to be a partnership of some sort. Then it was mostly sketching, drawings, then making quick prototypes.

For me the way something like this works is iterative. How thin can you make the edge, the bezel? How deep can you actually make this dish? Because if I couldn’t go at least this depth the concept is dead, right? How can you make this dish so that it’s deep enough to have this kind of reflectivity? Can the hands actually go over the dots? Now the hands are actually floating a little higher. We had to work with their engineers on changing the parts that are attached to the movement. And the movement itself, so that it is stable and it won’t break when it’s at that height.

There is a lot of, like, “OK, we have an idea. We’re excited about it. We think there is potential.” Then you go explore that it’s within the parameters of your imagination, that it actually can have this depth and this look. But you don’t know.

It’s a heartbreaker when somebody comes back and says, “It can be this depth, not more.” You’re like, “I don’t know if it’s going to work.” Then you machine it in the work.

We machine in aluminum. I knew I wanted to use aluminum, and I knew I wanted to machine aluminum. Because that’s the only way to get this kind of precision, this kind of definition of the ridges and the domes and these different finishes out of a single material, out of one piece of material.

Om: That is one thing that I love about these quartz watches, which are $300 to $1,000 watches: There’s a lot of interesting design in there. People playing around a bunch with the watch-face design. It’s a more affordable watch, so you can be experimental.

Yves: Yeah, take more risks. I want to consume things that are experiments. It needs to be something that you don’t know if it’s really going to work. But you hope it does, and you want to be a supporter. You want to help someone forge their dream.

It’s hard to find a new expensive product that I want. There are some great historical pieces that I want. But it’s hard to commit to a brand-new product that is just launching, a luxury product, let’s say, if it’s not an experiment, if nobody’s taken any risks, if it’s just right. Just right is boring.

The Watch Collector

Om: Which watches do you like, apart from yours?

Yves: I have a couple of Pateks.

Om: No, no. Amongst experimental-design ones.

Yves: Oh. All the Lip watches from the ’60s. Lip is the guy who did the TGV train. Of today, you mean? I like Omegas. In a market in Thailand I found the first Omega Seamaster that was digital. It doesn’t have a digital display; it’s an analog display. It looks like a complete volcano. Every surface of the watch goes to the top. Then there’s a circular dial. I supported the first ana‑digi watch I ever saw. Then I also liked the electronic mechanical watch, that Swiss brand.

Om: One of the more ironic things about the Apple Watch is that more people are interested in watches now. We thought that Apple would crush everybody, but now more people are paying attention to the idea of a watch as a fashion accessory.

Yves: Also as a sign of personal style and belief. That’s the issue: Some of these digital products, they don’t give you the opportunity to express yourself, even when there is range. I’ve always been a big fan of range. We were probably the first ones, with Jawbone, to do a range of different headset colors or different Jambox colors and finishes and colors and textures. But most technology products come in one flavor.

When things move to the body — your eyes, your wrist, your feet, the bags you carry, et cetera — that is so important. There is something so visceral about our need to express ourselves through the objects we wear.

Photos by Om Malik. Watch sketches courtesy of Fuseproject.