Haworth, Inc. produces a broad collection of office furniture, including raised access floors, moveable walls, systems furniture, seating, storage, and wood casegoods. With a vision to change the way interior spaces are designed and built, Haworth seeks to translate business goals into physical environments.Downtown Downtown Fits like a glove. Pelle Frau® Color System leather upholstery that fits like a glove, a sculptural silhouette, and tone-on-tone stitching are hallmarks of Downtown executive and visitor chairs. The back is inspired by an elegant dress. Available in five versions, the profile stays slim by hiding the built-in mechanisms. For added comfort, optional micro-perforation.Designed By Jean-Marie MassaudJean-Marie Massaud has dedicated himself to industrial and furniture design. Born in Toulouse, he worked both in Asia and in France before opening his own office in Paris in 1994. His contextual approach centers on research into the essential and a focus on the individual.
Since collaborating with Marc Berthier his work in city planning has led him towards design and architecture. Many of his designs are in the collections of major museums worldwide.Sillería / Silla / Privado / PrivadosCF Office KC added 3 new photos.230 OTG Task chairs $55.00 each Chairs are like new condition Buy 1 or 10 Call, Text or Email with any questions. After decades (well, a couple anyway) of spending too many hours a day in a cheap office chair, I've decided that I'm going to spend some decent money on a good quality, comfortable chair ... but what should I buy? Personally, I'm leaning towards the Herman Miller Aeron - this chair seems ergonomic, durable, functional, geeky and fun. It's not a cheap chair but considering that I currently throw away a $100-150 chair every 12-18 months because of random issues, over time a decent chair (assuming it lasts!) will be more economical than a cheap one. The only problem I have with the Aeron is that I'm choosing from a pool of one.
This is where you come in. What office chair do you recommend? If you have an Aeron, what do you think of it? If you have something else, how has that stood up?Till recently, employees of software company Microsoft India in Gurgaon, adjoining the Capital, would budget an extra 10-20 minutes for all meetings. With the office spread across four different floors in two separate buildings, DLF Cyber Greens and DLF Infinity, they just had to. In February, says Rohit Thakur, head, human resources, Microsoft India, the Gurgaon team shifted to a new, 70,000 sq. ft office in DLF Epitome—11km away—partly to fix this road bump in active collaboration. “We wanted to ensure that we work co-opt more, so we requested for all the staff to be located at one office,” he says. The new workspace, built along Microsoft’s global Workplace Advantage Program guidelines, is kitted out with 60 meeting rooms of varying sizes and specifications, from telephone rooms for one-on-one conversations, focus rooms that can accommodate four-six people at a time, to meeting rooms for larger consultations.
For all-hands meetings, the retractable walls in the cafeteria can be pushed out to merge with the reception area and create a large hall. “Spontaneous collaboration, brainstorming and teamwork are key tenets of the new office,” says Thakur. Designing a workspace primed for collaboration is about “more than just checking the box that a space has a couple of lounges”, says Singapore-based , regional workspace strategist, Asia, for Microsoft, in an email interview. Part of the “real estate” team at the technology company, Ayres says the global team at Microsoft was looking for ideas that would support chance run-ins with other employees, impromptu huddles, scrums (15-minute meetings conducted standing up, usually to bring everyone in the team up to speed and highlight any issues), brainstorming sessions, work groups and formal meetings as well as breakout and relaxation zones. So it began internal research around one seemingly simple question: How does work get done? In 2005, Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates too had touched on the question.
He wrote in a white paper, titled “Digital Work Style: The New World Of Work”, that the nature of work was changing and that office design and support services needed to keep pace. “Over the next decade, shared workspaces will become far more robust, with richer tools to automate workflow and connect all the people, data and resources it takes to get things done,” Gates said. So, free seating and flexitimings, high-speed wireless connectivity and plug points in all parts of the office, seating options ranging from sofas to stools and office chairs, and furniture—including tables—that can be moved around for impromptu meetings, are all ideas that emerged from the need for greater mobility and an “activity-oriented” office. “People are coming to the Microsoft campus, but they’re only in their assigned workspace an average of 45% of the time,” explains Ayres. The way he sees it, the rest of their work hours may be spent in “intra-campus mobile, touching down at hub counters to chat with a co-worker, working in cafés between meetings, travelling to other buildings to collaborate on projects”, among other activities.
The office infrastructure, then, should enable employees to work from anywhere, any time. Bangalore-based , team lead, interiors, DSP Design Associates Pvt. Ltd, which got the mandate to furnish the Gurgaon office, says the brief clearly emphasized flexibility, mobility and greater collaboration. It’s the reason they chose, among other things, work tables that are not fixed to the floor. So not only can the 250-plus employees move around in the office, choosing to sit where they like depending on their workload for the day, their mood or preferences, they can also shift office furniture around to make room for more people in cross-team meetings. “The point here is that the current office does not have any assigned desk apart from the ones for the support teams, which means that workstations are shared between employees,” says Jain. Only the “Tech Link” staff has a fixed location at the centre of the office, so employees always know where to go for technology support.
Jain adds: “The facility is designed with a sharing ratio of 2.4:1 (that is, with 2.4 seats on average per employee) and all the other spaces apart from workstations are also considered work seats. So all the collaboration spaces, café, lounge, focus and phone rooms are designed in such a way that people can work there for longer hours. Attention was given while choosing furniture for these areas, power and data/Wi-Fi points are provided in all such locations.” Even the leadership team doesn’t get fixed workstations. The bosses only get an earmarked section with thumbtacked notes on soft boards announcing the “leadership neighbourhood”—an interesting take on the open-door policy. This section is far from closed off to employees across ranks. On the summer day we visited the office, even the leadership team seemed to be shunning the neighbourhood, to avoid the direct blaze of the afternoon sun coming in through the large glass windows. The windows, and a large part of the decor, are designed to “bring the outside inside”.
Meeting rooms are named after mountains and rivers, and employee lockers have clouds, birds and plants painted on them. Also, collaboration is only one-half of the story. For individual, heads-down work at the office, there are quiet zones—the only areas with partitions between the workstations. The U-shaped workspace doesn’t have corner offices for the leadership team, but employees across ranks can use the telephone rooms as closed-door cabins for up to 2 hours. Microsoft’s sales offices globally are designed also as shopfronts for its technology solutions. The Gurgaon office, quite like the recently refurbished facilities in Tokyo (Japan), Sydney (Australia), London (UK) and Seoul (South Korea), is a demonstration of how Microsoft technologies can be used. The Lync app, for example, is used widely in the Gurgaon facility by people to publish their location so others know exactly where they are in the office—this is useful in the absence of assigned seats. The app also allows employees to book meeting rooms remotely.
Microsoft Xbox consoles and the latest Windows 8.1 computers can be seen across the office. To be sure, the office leaves some things to be desired. While employees report having brought their children and parents in to see their swanky new office on weekends, there is no crèche on the premises. The relaxation rooms have three Osim massage chairs, but there’s no gym for staffers yet. And the cafeteria depends on a caterer to bring in meals. Still, snacking options abound. The 250 employees in the office, and their guests, go through 120 bottles of soft beverages, the small Maaza glass bottles being the most popular, and 900 cookies every day. In the evening, snacks served on the house are a great favourite. On the day we visited, troops converged from all parts of the office, and a team gave up its game of table tennis in the cafeteria just after 5pm, to snack on chowmein. After that, judging by the crowded lifts, it is time to go home—for most. sofas, office chairs, stools- each seating option serves a different purpose
The Eames Elephant was born in 1945, at the hands of the American design couple Charles and . Then made with plywood, it was intended as a plaything for tots. The elephant passed into furniture design for children at Swiss manufacturer Vitra in the noughties, and two brightly coloured plastic specimens made their way this year to Microsoft’s new Gurgaon office. The Eames Elephant, in classic red and dark lime, is a playful addition to the office; it draws attention even among the tens of different types of seating arrangements there. The light stools—they were benignly looking out over the chaos of Gurgaon through large windows on the day we visited—aren’t comfortable to sit on for long periods, but they do meet the brief for offering mobility around the office. In 2010, Prof. at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Netherlands, published the results of research linking office design and productivity. In “New Ways Of Working: Microsoft’s ‘Mobility’ Office”, partly funded by Microsoft, Prof. van Heck wrote that mobility—both within and across offices—could enhance performance greatly.
“Now, no one has a fixed office any more and the building has been designed to be what we call activity based.... It is a workspace, where employees can locate themselves in different parts of the building depending on the tasks they need to perform. Increasingly, it is a meeting place where employees can interact with colleagues, partners and clients,” he wrote. On busy days, employees might spend 10-12 hours glued to their chairs. And while “nature made the human body for walking”—as Anil Arora, unit head, orthopaedics, at the Max Super Speciality Hospital in Patparganj, New Delhi, puts it—the next best thing on such days is a chair with ample lower-back support. We found at least two chairs that fit this description at the Microsoft office—the Haworth Zody Task, with adjustable height and incline, and a soft but firm seat to make long hours of sitting as comfortable as possible; and the Steelcase SW 1 Lounge swivel chair in lime green with a mesh back. In the games room, the Hosu chair by of Spain looked inviting—the quilted texture allowing you to sink right in.