Spotlight | Product Designer Report
Barber & Osgerby Ecco for Glas Italia
Who is responding to this? Edward Barber Company name: Barber & Osgerby How is the continual change in workplace trends impacting on what you produce? Our job as designers is to be protagonists. Our job is to see what’s happening around us and offer solutions and improvements for the continuously changing world we live in. The workplace is one of the fastest changing areas of both design and social interaction. With the proliferation of portable devices over the last decade, the workplace has expanded from the office to the home, plane, bus, café and hotel lobby. Combined with the huge increase of freelance workers, the coworking office is now becoming the norm. We saw these changes as the starting point for our Soft Work system for Vitra. We strongly believe that the conventional chair and desk are dying and that Soft Work could replace that. How do you become informed about the changes in workplace transformation? The idea for a work-focused sofa system came after observation of the lobby area at the Ace Hotel London. After designing the space, we noted that, for 12 hours a day, every single seat – not just those around the long worktable – was taken with people tapping away at laptops, tablets and phones. Coupled with the fact that we spend a lot of our time travelling, where much of it is spent working in different locations and environments, we started thinking that there are just so many people that work this way, we need to design the appropriate system for it.
60 | Mix 192 March 2019
Our job as designers is to be protagonists. Our job is to see what’s happening around us and offer solutions and improvements for the continuously changing world we live in
BREA for DEDON