While we’re all familiar with the changes technology has brought to our lives over the 21st century, trends in the industry that brought these innovations have created unique revolutions in our society. One of these revolutions is how we approach office design and aesthetics.
Office design did not change much in the forty or so years between 1960 and the early 2000s. Office plans were usually a maze of cubicles broken up by walking paths featuring corner offices, a lobby, and a break room.
Things began to shift subtly in the 1990s with the dot-com bubble. Founders who had struck out on their own to escape the standard office environment desired a new way to do business to match their innovative products.
Enter the open-concept office.
Open Concept Office Design Takes Over
While the dot-com bubble was short-lived, innovations in office design were here to stay. The 2000s saw a new wave of tech giants emerge, and their founders embraced the design choices of their forebears.
Open-concept office design eschews the barriers put up by things like cubicle panels and solid walls in favor of a borderless and depersonalized space. Shared desking solutions with minimal barriers, glass walls encasing conference rooms and private offices, and spaces dedicated to quick, informal communication between employees are all hallmarks of the design style.
The design style provided three primary advantages to the quickly expanding industry. First, the lack of barriers facilitates employee communication, meaning ideas can be shared quickly and easily.
Next, the design style incorporates various new materials into its schema, including glass, metal, and plastics. This combination of materials creates a more futuristic aesthetic—one that would certainly appeal to companies working to advance society into the future.
Finally, it allows office managers to use tech innovations to simplify office planning. Laptops and Wi-Fi allow workers to pick a spot at random each day, so managers must ensure that they have access to power and peripherals like printers.
With the growing buzz around tech, the design style began spreading outside the industry. By 2020, a full 70% of offices in the U.S. were at least partially open-concept.
Unfortunately, during that same period, the downsides of the design style came into view. Designs that benefited open communication and socializing also created significant distractions for employees, to the point that it’s been estimated that open offices experience a 20% dip in efficiency.
Despite this, many companies still long for the futuristic aesthetic of open offices. Thankfully, furniture companies like Friant were not satisfied with being left behind during the tech boom and developed lines like the Interra system to satisfy both the efficiency and aesthetic needs for modern companies.
The Interra Compromise
Friant noted the popularity of space-age materials in contemporary open offices and incorporated them into their Interra line of workspaces. Panels and walls utilize materials like powdered metal and frosted glass to create the contemporary, modern look you’d find in the big Silicon Valley firms today.
The panels themselves come with internalized data and power connectors, providing workers with everything they need in one convenient location. Workstations can be customized to meet specialist needs and provide a welcome bit of privacy for workers tired of being exposed to the whole company as they work.
The workstations are designed to be easily deployed and broken down for quick expansion or subtraction in the office population to match the convenience of open-concept offices. Each panel is lightweight, durable, and stackable, reducing the need for additional storage space.
Friant’s Interra line of workstations perfectly compromises a contemporary aesthetic and the efficiency bonuses of a closed-office design. If you are in Orange County or Los Angeles and want to see how Interra can fit into your office design, there’s only one place to find them: Creative Office Design. Call today!
