Steelcase Flexes and Roams

 

A few weeks ago, in New York City, Steelcase unveiled its new Flex Collection, a collection of work-focused furniture pieces intended to address the needs of agile thinking and design thinking teams.

And in its continuing partnership with Microsoft, it also introduced Steelcase Roam, a mobile stand and easy-to-hang wall mounting system designed to work in tandem with Microsoft’s newly unveiled next-gen Surface Hub 2S, an all-in-one collaboration device built for teamwork.

The Flex Collection includes moveable desks, tables, whiteboards, carts, space dividers and accessories that can be rearranged on-demand, making it easy to shift “from a brainstorm to a workshop, or from a daily stand up to a sprint review.”

To get the scoop on Flex, we spoke with Bill Bennie, Steelcase Design Director, and David Cooper, Product Category Manager.

Flex grew out of an exploration by Steelcase’s research team to address the changing nature of the business world.

“The business world is much more dynamic and more volatile,” said Mr. Bennie. “Businesses are under a tremendous amount of pressure to innovate and to survive. In looking at the market and talking to our clients, we identified two major focuses – agile technology processes and design processes. What are all the applications of these agile teams? We thought about sprint planning, daily stand-up meetings, etc. And then, what are the fewest pieces we can create to address those functions? We can’t create just a simple table – that’s no longer enough. But, there is beauty in simplicity. So, how do you take all of these aspects of the brief and mesh them together?”

In designing Flex, Steelcase sought to help organizations in their needs to grow and to innovate. The Steelcase research team identified two types of high-performing “power users”: agile teams and design thinking teams. The research found that these high-performing teams were organically creating their own new ways of organizing, to accommodate their work processes.

The Steelcase research team found three overriding themes relating to how agile and design thinking teams interact with their workspaces:

>On-command adaptability. Empowering people to make the space work for them. “We heard a lot of: ‘Our projects and teams change often, and I want our space to be like software, which I can download when I need.’”

>Show the flow. Making information – the work – visible. Ubiquitous post-it notes. Every available space used for markerboards. Making the team’s work visible and pervasive. And, adding the digital content and remote workers into that visible space.

>Making it personal. Providing a way for teams to make their space their own.

In designing Flex, Steelcase design wanted to look at flexibility with fresh eyes.

“We wanted to define flexibility as more than just mobility/movability,” said Mr. Cooper. “The first instinct is to just put it on wheels, but we wanted to think beyond that. We wanted to be able to provide the right level of mobility.’

“In addition to mobility, we wanted to provide versatility, as part of flexibility. The concepts that made the cut in Flex are ones that address multiple needs within one piece. This idea of mobility and versatility equals flexibility.”

The marker boards and tackable screens push work to the visual forefront of the workspace.

“For the marker boards, we wanted a surface that is lightweight and portable, but also large enough to store a lot of information,” said Mr. Cooper. “The marker boards are less than 10lbs. and still have a huge amount of usable space to write on.”

Flex also includes a marker board cart that can store up to ten marker boards, and doubles as an easel.

Another key piece in the collection is the height-adjustable desk. Cooper and Bennie note the Steelcase design team focused its attention on mobility issues.

“One of the biggest challenges was in designing the height-adjustable desks,” noted Mr. Bennie. “We wanted to make a better caster, because casters can be awkward. The spinning motion can be awkward and clunky, and pieces that are set on casters often have stability issues. In our height-adjustable desk, we wanted to create a clean and subtle integrated wheel. The desk doesn’t drift away from you, but when you want to move it, it moves easily.”

We wanted there to be no trade-off between mobility and stability. The desks are substantial, but we also designed the rollers to be super easy for the user to move. The other big barrier to actually moving a desk around is power cords.”

Flex’s desk features five power outlets, all connected to one single outgoing power cord. A braided power cord built into the desks provides a softer aesthetic.

Working through the ergonomic challenges of adding wheels was particularly challenging.

“We wanted to adhere to the specific BIFMA guidelines for ergonomics,” said Mr. Cooper. “When adding wheels, we found it knocked the entire desk height off the guidelines set for the most optimal ergonomic benefits. We wanted to make sure all of those guidelines were followed.”

Flex’s free-standing screens can be a pin board one day and a privacy screen the next, featuring magnetic side edges that can snap together for more space and provide an option for visual and acoustic privacy in open plan.

Flex’s Acoustic Boundary provides an acoustic and visual privacy option on a larger, team-size scale – creating a space within a space. The boundaries are offered in two sizes: 7 foot and 10 foot tall.

“With the Acoustic Boundaries, we were asking, ‘How quickly and easily can you go from three individual smaller spaces to one larger team space with just a few pieces already in your space?’” said Mr. Bennie. “The acoustic boundaries are a really cool piece that almost feels like a kid being in a fort. You can roll them around you to create more privacy and focus in a specific area.”

As everything in Flex is built around extreme ease of use and flexibility, visual integration was a key concern. In seeking to provide visual continuity along with the ability for teams to make space personal to them, Steelcase set materiality as a major priority in designing Flex.

“There are tons of material aesthetic combinations, so that we’re not creating a hacked, disjointed workspace,” said Mr. Cooper.

“We introduced Flex and Roam with Microsoft in New York, and it’s been a really fun few weeks,” said Mr. Cooper. “Internally, it’s been a really cool, unique experience for us, too. At the same time that Flex was in development, our IT teams were in the process of reorganizing into a more agile way of working. We’ve been able to live this out and prototype it on ourselves. That shift to agile within our own teams built a lot of excitement internally about it. It was just a really fun process for us to work through solutions for.”