If Bill Stumpf had his way, every jumbo jet would have a stargazer lounge on top, seats in the tail, and a pulldown telescope for each passenger. Taxis would have see-through convertible tops, cities would build more public squares and fountains, and suburbs would cluster around town centers with sidewalks.
And the design of our workday world would provide as much fun as efficiency.
Stumpf created the famous ergonomic Aeron, Equa, and Ergon chairs for the Herman Miller furniture company -- your own desk chair is probably modeled on his work. The designer has collected his ideas on making the United States a more humane country through everyday design.
His new book is The Ice Palace That Melted Away: Restoring Civility and Other Lost Virtues To Everyday Life (Pantheon Books). The title comes from an immaculate ice palace in St. Paul, Minnesota, that volunteers created in 1992 for no other reason except to create "a joyful monument to sheer public pleasure, a work of public love," he wrote.
Wired News asked Stumpf to take a critical look at our everyday world and suggest how he might redesign it, especially in regard to workplaces and computers.
Wired News: Modern offices don't always strike visitors as civil. How do you see them?
Bill Stumpf: The growth [in numbers] of white-collar workers, combined with the economic cost of real estate, has left workers with less and less space, more like chickens in a chicken factory. This is increasingly unpopular among information workers who are increasingly more independent of corporate control.
Look at the European model, where, by law, an office building must have views of the outdoors, good interior climate, a certain amount of ultraviolet light that reaches every worker -- that's a law in Germany and Sweden, it's not a law here. We have windowless, terribly confined cubicalized spaces.
WN: Are cube farms all bad?
BS: From the architectonic standpoint, there's nothing wrong with a small place. From the ergonomic view, if you look at any desktop, we only work in what I call the "A Zone," that space you can reach with your fingers and can see.
The rest of that beyond becomes a mess. In front of me it's 40 inches wide by 24 inches deep -- that's the most vital part of my work area. Everything around it is less important. I'm actually involved in a cubicle-reform project where we're looking at the box itself and saying, "How do you make a small space seem larger?" WN: And how do you do it?
BS: Frank Lloyd Wright opened the corners of buildings. We're looking at opening the corners of the box so you can see through, which greatly relieves the sense of confinement. We're aerating the walls of the cubicle, so air flows through it and doesn't just come down from the top, and we're making it a lot brighter with lighting.
Computers have led people to turn lights down so offices are darker and darker. We're looking at localized light around the computer face, not darkening entire rooms. We're also encouraging a more residential aesthetic so the workplace doesn't seem so institutional, like [using] table lamps and other devices.
WN: In your work in re-creating offices, do you see any positive trends?
BS: The office being the only place you work is dying. Most good photographers don't use only one camera or only one kind of film, and many real high-performance workers I know have multiple workplaces. The idea of getting up and moving around during the day is very important for a change of scenery.
WN: How would you change computers?
BS: Let's start with the screen. Most of us have larger television screens than computer screens. I see more design theater around the idea of computers, where the image is much larger and the input devices are much more intuitive and easy to use.
I know a CAD operator in the Twin Cities who rigged up a rear projection device to his computer and it's wonderful. He can sit in a La-Z-Boy chair and use a mouse to do work on a 40-inch screen. It's a tremendous difference in perception. It's like the difference in a picture hanging on a wall and a mural. And the larger the format the more flexible your posture.
WN: Most futurists see integration into the household for computers. When will that happen?
BS: The problem is these damn computer companies. They see what they do the way the appliance manufacturers did in the 1930s, when people were so hungry for their products. They don't give a damn about how [the products] integrate into the built environment. When refrigerators first came out they stood in splendor alone in the kitchen. Today they're modular and fit into a furniture scheme.
Computers, printers, and all the peripherals stand like little edifices all by themselves. In my mind, the next step is to move them into the way we live and the way we work. They'll be more in the background.
