IIDA Perspective - Fall/Winter 2011 - 55

A Taxonomy of Office Chairs By Jonathan olivares Phaidon Press (May 2011) 256 pages, $39.95 Whereas garfield approaches his subject with entertaining storytelling, olivares provides an almost scientific catalogue and taxonomy of office chairs dating from the 1840s to the present. It’s an exhaustive visual and technical history of the evolution of office chairs with every aspect of the chair broken down from headrests to casters. It starts with an essay tracing the social and historical forces behind the office chair’s development. A catalogue follows, representing 180 chairs that have “significantly altered the course of office chair design.” All our favorites are here: marcel breuer, Charles and ray Eames, gio Ponti, richard sapper, and Jasper morrison. The taxonomy, containing 400 illustrations, is organized by component and then chronologically. It seems the lumbar support wasn’t invented until 1994. A chapter on methods of movement details an 1849 chair that pivoted 360 degrees (your Aeron chair doesn’t do that!) to our latest innovation, the 2009 sideways backrest tilt. This unprecedented encyclopedia of office chair morphology is the result of four years of research analyzing thousands of chairs. All is meticulously indexed and cross-referenced throughout. (you may end up fantasizing that olivares is a distant relative constructing your family tree.) With the passion of a nabokovian butterfly collector, olivares has written what might be, he suggests, “the first taxonomy of an industrialized object.”

Venhuizen’s games have a formal fixed structure with an array of rules to guard against a democratized free-for-all that inevitably results in an unsatisfying compromise. game Urbanism argues for this process with many case studies and examples, then walks the reader through several types of games in a workbook section. It’s a dense, complex tome that, like any type of spatial planning, requires some immersion for comprehension and insights.

WEBSITES

Game Urbanism By Hans Venhuizen Valiz Book and Cultural Projects (February 2011) 224 pages, $35.00 Increasingly, interior designers are creating spaces with an awareness of their larger physical and social contexts, and they’re developing innovative processes to capture knowledge and integrate a variety of stakeholders in the design process. urban planning involves complex infrastructure, political, and economic issues, yet the emerging area of “cultural planning” is evolving the practice for more inclusive and responsive design processes that may be instructive to interior designers. Venhuizen is a leader in culture-based urban planning, a practice that aims to broaden the field of planning beyond addressing infrastructure and physical space to include social and cultural aspects of a community or region. It begins its process by exploring the existing culture and area, including its architecture, art, heritage, and contemporary culture of its inhabitants. Large-scale social games are the instruments with which Venhuizen penetrates and engages communities. His theory is that games can simplify complex situations and expose the true concerns of communities. Professionals and non-professionals take part in these simulations, which involve stakeholders in the process and provide planners with insights about the residents.

There’s an ever growing plethora of wonderful curated design blogs from which to get inspiration. For workplace design, check out Workalicious.org, a blog featuring workplace design, furniture, implements, and culture edited by gregory La Vardera, an architect and enthusiast of modern workplaces. He also directs viewers to other Web sites and links about workplace culture, such as “studios to die for” on Flickr. Officedesignblog.com is organized by office furniture, design, décor, and assessories, where you’ll find unusual items like a writing desk made of paper and weighing just as much, or fruit-shape sticky notes for those who loath using Post-it’s bland yellow squares.

Don’t want to read? Blueantstudio.blogspot.com’s contact sheetlike home page lets you quickly skim single images of a collection of modern architecture, home accessories and current design trends. Click the image to enlarge it and for a brief description. Then throw out your pie charts and get inspiration from information designer David mcCandless’ site Informationisbeautiful.net. Click on Visualizations for brilliant infographics such as Colors in Culture (cultures around the world align four different colors with “intelligence”) or waste time with the Hierarchy of Digital Distractions. —Jan Lakin 55

perspective

http://www.Workalicious.org http://www.Officedesignblog.com http://www.blueantstudio.blogspot.com http://www.Informationisbeautiful.net

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IIDA Perspective - Fall/Winter 2011