KI has Big Plans for NeoCon

OI: Before we get too deeply into the discussion of your new products for NeoCon, I’d like you to tell me a bit about yourself and how you got to your current position at KI.

SG: I came to KI nearly eight years ago from Knoll in Grand Rapids. I had worked there for five years, as Director of Marketing for their storage category. My primary focus there was design development and management of the storage portfolio and later I worked in that role with Knoll systems.

Prior to Knoll, I worked in product marketing and design and development with Steelcase. I worked in the Pyramid in Caledonia for about three years and I was one of the first people in the Steelcase product department to work on a design and development initiative with IDEO, also I was on the Pathways post and beam team. Prior to that, for about ten years I was with Trendway, in Holland, Michigan, where I worked in product marketing, design development.

So I’ve been in this industry my entire professional life and I’ve had the opportunity to work with people who have been tremendous mentors for me in terms of design, like Carl Magnusson, Jeffery Bernett, Benjamin Pardo, Jack Cottrell and David Gresham, you know, there’s a whole list of people I’ve had the opportunity to work with over the years who have helped shape my career.

OI: You have a big lineup for NeoCon again this year.

SG: We have been running, on average, a little over six products a year for the last five years so we’ve definitely had a focus on new product development. Everything in our showroom this year will have been designed and developed in the last five years, so what you’ll see is basically an all-new KI.

We have been so aggressive in new product development because we’ve seen a lot of change in our markets where things seem to be moving toward a more residential aesthetic. We’re also seeing a convergence of user needs within the vertical markets we’re in: business, healthcare and education. We’re seeing a lot of the same types of planning and similar applications in all three markets. So a lot of the products we’re developing now have application across all our markets.

For a long time KI was seen as much more about being robust, durable, and potentially institutional in our design constructs and execution. Don’t get me wrong, I think contract furniture should be pragmatic – it can be functional, but it needs to be beautiful as well. And it can’t be just a collection of discrete pieces, each on its own. There has to be a focus on how all these individual components work together within the collective, to address applications and planning in a way that’s based on people and how they will use the furniture.

OI: So let’s talk about your new products for NeoCon. The Sway Chair looks unique.

SG: We wanted a lounge chair that actually has some type of kinetic response, one that can move when a person is sitting in it. The geometry of the Sway chair is a lot like a ball glove and the simple mechanism we’ve designed allows the chair to rotate axially. Task seating moves, but it doesn’t move in an orbital fashion, with a few exceptions the motion of task chairs is just back and forth. Users can lean back and lean forward but mostly the chair keeps you in that sort of pendulum movement.

Sway is a made of a rotation molded polypropylene shell with upholstered seat and back pads. On the underside of the polypropylene shell there’s a steel pan similar to those saucer-type sleds kids use in snow. The base has contact points of Delrin, an engineering thermoplastic used in precision parts requiring high stiffness, low friction and excellent dimensional stability and then there’s a strong but flexible bungee-like cord that connects the two pieces together. So the effect is that the two pieces are joined together, but the chair can rotate in several axes. When the user gets up the chair returns to the home position and looks like a normal chair.

Sway’s aesthetic is really something of an icon, I think it has the potential to be one of those pieces of furniture or artifacts that people like and grow to associate with KI. The sway family is completed by a stool/ottoman and a table all aesthetically linked by using the same base.

OI: Is Evoke a new demountable wall system?

SG: Yes, it is. And whereas Sway has a huge aesthetic impact, Evoke is designed to do just the opposite – to be aesthetically passive. We wanted a demountable product with all the benefits that implies, but that competed with drywall as closely as possible in terms of touch and feel. We wanted a passive visual element with minimal seams and gaps, and hence excellent acoustic properties.

Evoke consists of steel panels that ship unitized and have many of the qualities you get with drywall, but it exceeds drywall in terms of its STC rating. An Evoke panel-run of ten feet uses two five foot wide panels with only one sixteenth of an inch segmentation line between the two panels, other than that the run is completely monolithic, and we can do that up to heights of twelve feet.

Users can paint Evoke panels like they would drywall. We ship them with a textured white powder-coat and users can literally take a roller and paint it with a latex paint in the field. We also offer an inkjet processing where we literally print on the steel skins, so we can apply any kind of geometric pattern or wood grain or branding directly on to the steel, which also helps to mask the seams.

From a labor and assembly point of view Evoke is very straightforward and you get tremendous consistency from a built-quality standpoint. There’s a frame and a steel skin is applied to each side of the frame. There’s a special tool that allows you to pop the skins off. They actually attach a lot like the lid on a Tupperware container. There’s an extruded piece that runs around the perimeter so they seal nicely and they get very good cohesion within the extrusions. But if you need to come back and run power, you can just pop the skin off.

The system includes acoustic panels of upholstered high-density fiberglass that come in different thicknesses so designers can play with the topology while improving the overall acoustics of a space. And since Evoke is steel the panels attach magnetically, so they can be easily rearranged when the need arises.

We are super excited, we think Evoke will change the rules for solid dividing walls, just as our Lightline glass wall changed the rules for storefronts in 2012. And both wall products have changed the rules for defining and dividing space.

OI: I see you have listed Soltice among your new products, but I know a product that’s been in your line with that name.

SG: Yes, Soltice was designed by Dan Cramer and Paul James, about five years ago. It has a wood frame. In selling a Bariatric version of Soltice we observed that the physical requirements of the application can be extremely demanding, so we wanted a product that had elements made of steel to stand up to the rigors of those more abusive environments. But we also wanted the product to be intrinsically beautiful.

As you know, a chair intended for healthcare applications has a number of performance requirements: It has to facilitate ingress and egress and cleanability standards. It has to accommodate things like standard clean aisles, removable seat cushions and those types of things. So we required those functions to be inherent in the design. So Soltice Metal isn’t a revolutionary product, I think it’s really an evolutionary product that’s based on the Soltice platform, but it certainly fills a gap, as we’re seeing more of a need for metal furniture in healthcare settings.

OI: Tell us about the new Pallas Textiles.

SG: We’re launching two new collections: Expressions and On the DotTM. We’ve made some organizational changes in the past year to ensure that Pallas is part of our overall design process. We continue to advance Pallas based on this whole idea of “smart.” Naturally we want Pallas textiles to be beautiful but like all KI products, we want them to have inherent within their designs the robustness, the longevity, the supporting attributes that make them valuable. When you think about our connection with healthcare and higher education it’s very important for our textiles to be bleach-cleanable and so forth. For us, Pallas is one expression of that level of performance.

The Expressions collection is inspired by the modernist Expressionism movement, it features an artful blend of patterns and textures with a great deal of dynamic energy. Just as famous Expressionist paintings use color to evoke emotions, so too does the Expressions Collection.

On the DotTM focuses on the dot form, a symbol of something whole. In ancient times, it represented the calm of the moon as well as the energy of the sun. Dots are round, spontaneous and fun. Its simple form can be used in infinite possibilities. The collection’s focus on dimension and texture makes On The Dot™ timeless and sophisticated yet relevant in today’s world.