The Complete Handbook of Office Furniture

Chapter 1: Understanding Office Furniture

Walk into any working office and you will see them: a landscape of desks, chairs, screens, and storage. They are the most mundane objects on the floor, so ubiquitous that they fade into the background. But this familiarity is exactly why they are so misunderstood. Office furniture is not a set of passive objects. It is a functional system of tools and infrastructure, engineered to support specific human activities. It is a major capital investment. And, for better or worse, it is a silent amplifier of either productivity and health or of strain and physical decline. Understanding it is the difference between throwing money at a problem and solving it.

First, we need to discard the idea that "office furniture" is one thing. A visitor to a contractor's workshop and a visitor to a law firm's headquarters will see two completely different worlds of furniture. The reality is that the term covers a wide field, broadly organized around the core tasks of knowledge work. At its most basic, this is seating, work surfaces, and storage. But the modern office is defined by its systems. This includes the freestanding tables and chairs you can buy from a budget catalog, and the sophisticated, wall-to-wall panel and beam systems that create entire individual workspaces in a few hours. It covers the standing-height tables in a collaboration zone and the heavy, task-rated chairs in a 24-hour call center. To understand the subject, we must understand this taxonomy of function