Saturday, April 28, 2012

Why Office Furniture Is Constantly Evolving

By Karen Taylor


Office furniture is constantly on the move as designs adapt to work and social conditions. The adjective 'bureaucratic' takes most of its meaning from the piece of furniture that was used, often officiously, by people who had rules and information stored in cabinets, or bureaus.

Factories, cities and offices evolved together as important features in industrialized societies. They were rooms where people worked together. Senior people would be accorded their own large room with an adjacent more public room for a secretary, furnished more modestly. If popular films were to believed every executive works with a panoramic view of the city and a large desk before a comfortable chair.

Victorian furniture would have followed the fashions and the needs of the times. The boss's room would have had small windows, and a heavy roll top timber desk. Inside a coal fire would have burned merrily. In an adjoining space thin clerks would sit on high stools scratching with pens on ledgers laid on sloping desks.

Late in nineteenth century some important inventions changed the ways that work spaces were furnished. The incandescent light bulb was an improvement on candles and when typewriters appeared the sloping writing tables had to be replaced with flat tables. A telephone rested here, attached to the wall by wires. To add to the air of efficiency fancy filing cabinets, often made of metal and thus fire proof lined the walls.

It is common for people to sit for eight hours of the day on office chairs. To sit in a healthy way with the abdominal muscles supporting the lower back is really a physically demanding task, more stressful for the back than physical work. In fact few people are capable of sitting in the correct way for eight hours and that is why back ache is a consequences of sitting in aircraft, cars and offices.

A great deal of design work has been done on chairs that might help to alleviate the back ache problem. Chairs should be well cushioned and yet firm. They should be so easily adjustable that a person can adjust his seat to his height, weight and normal body position. Many back problems are caused by sudden movements when twisting in and out of seats. That is why there should be casters on chairs so that they can be moved easily when a person sits or stands.

Another wave of change has swelled since the last decades of the twentieth century. Typewriters have become museum pieces, replaced by computers that become ever smaller. The once indispensable metal filing cabinets are finding themselves in auction rooms, made redundant by software packages and clouds that are invisible. Paper too begins to face extinction and even offices themselves might soon seem threatened. Office furniture will change again following fashions and making work spaces comfortable and efficient.




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