The brand new digital subject of Works journal is accessible for you right here. On this subject: we report from Orgatec with blended emotions; we’ve 4 undertaking tales from Toronto, Salford and London; interviews with Karim Rashid and Oskar Zieta; think about how the twenty first Century Workplace has its roots in twentieth Century Holland; ask the place all of the furnishings icons went; profile Future Designs; and all of the common commentary, firm information and options you want.
Welcome
Within the interval main as much as Orgatec, in the course of the present itself and even after the occasion, one dialog has cropped up time and again: will there be/is there/was there something really completely different on present? Will Europe’s greatest furnishings manufacturers emerge from the artistic doldrums of Covid and produce one other ‘Aeron second’, we questioned. The reply is, fairly unequivocally, no.
Now I’m not suggesting that Orgatec supplied up nothing by way of fascinating, good, practical and even thought-provoking merchandise – it simply didn’t give us sufficient and definitely didn’t throw out many ‘wow’ moments. The place was the provocative? The place was the really conceptual? The place was the enjoyable?
You’ll see from our evaluation of the present, later on this subject, that there have been quite a lot of firms who launched new designs that actually caught the attention, whereas a few others offered their newest wares in brilliantly progressive methods, however we nonetheless got here away from Cologne asking ourselves whether or not we’ve hit and previous the height period of office innovation. Have we reached saturation? Is there something really distinctive nonetheless brewing within the minds of the sector’s main product designers – or ought to firms be trying exterior of the marketplace for really progressive developments/creations?
I do know that this all takes time, cash and no little braveness (particularly in a difficult market), in addition to a contact of genius, but when furnishings markets can’t tick all these packing containers, then perhaps they shouldn’t trouble attempting – or extra particularly, they shouldn’t be telling us that they’re attaining all this when they’re clearly nowhere close to.
Perhaps it’s simply us. Perhaps we’ve reached that age. Perhaps we must always simply shut up and cease sounding like damaged information – though we do additionally spend far an excessive amount of of our time complaining about how there’s nothing actually new in music. Our mother and father used to say the identical factor about music although – and this was approach earlier than Aeron was even a spark within the minds of Messrs Stumpf and Chadwick!
Mick Jordan
Editor, Works Journal