Why flexible furniture?

In a remarkable phase of history when the world and the working world experienced the presumably widest transition of their history by the introduction of powerful technologies, including computers and communication technology, the development of office furniture displayed almost a standstill. The relevant DIN-standard for office furniture from the year 1936 was replaced in 1968 without changing much of the overall design of the furniture. All desks continued having a desktop with four edges and four legs with a more or less restricted space for the legs of the users. And the technology of the ban-saw ruled the design of office furniture!

Those performing work with office machines (typewrites, calculators) were granted the smallest and the lowest furniture with no sufficient space to place their legs. And, of course, it was almost impossible to move them. In the advent of the introduction of computers, people felt comfortable with the idea of using such desks for computer users, too. Why new design ideas – are computers no office machines?

Some organizations felt a need for experimenting with new designs because the industry failed to offer new product ideas. We have tried to find the optimum solution for a computerized workplace as a standard. Despite the fact that we have searched through 30 big organizations with many of them implementing their own solutions, no „standard“ was detected.

The „standard“ was established although the „standard solution“ was not found, but the insight that this would possibly never happen. Thus, the solution was preventing that the manufacturer of the furniture and the manufacturer of the machine determine the optimum way of using the technology. To achieve this goal, the computer manufacturers needed to separate their keyboard from the display units, and provide products with low profile, not higher than 30 mm in order to enable users or employers to organize the workplaces according to their needs and to enable them to reorganize them without causing costs and effort. And the furniture should enable people to organize different workplaces using the same equipment.

The promoters of this achievement have been DIN by issuing standards with a prospective nature, and the German Berufsgenossenschaften by establishing safety rules that have encouraged change.
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