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Welcome to Business x Design, a new newsletter on the power of design. In this email, Margaret Rhodes reflects on the legacy of Florence Knoll Bassett, who died this year but whose work continues to inform the lives of office workers. What else would you like to see from us? This newsletter is a work in progress supported by you, our readers. Reply to this email with your suggestions and feedback.
This time of year—by which I mean the lazy window after Christmas and before the new year—is best spent reading end-of-year journalism. Of the category, the feature I most anticipate is The New York Times Magazine’s annual essay series, “The Lives They Lived,” in which some of the best journalists in the business reflect on the artists, activists, innovators, and headline-makers who died in the past year. While reading this year’s, I got distracted by an adjacent Times article: “In a Year of Notable Deaths, a World of Women Who Shattered Ceilings.” Scrolling down, I found myself looking at a grainy photo of the designer Florence Knoll Bassett, sitting at a conference room table, the lone woman among at least 10 men.
Florence Knoll Bassett died in January—a lifetime ago in headlines—at the age of 101. She is invariably referred to as a design pioneer and icon of modernism. With her husband Hans Knoll, she led the eponymous furniture and textile company that helped transform corporate offices from fusty, cluttered rooms into airy spaces primed for collaborative thinking. Revisiting Knoll Bassett’s methods, her prescience in human-centered design is striking. From The Washington Post’s obituary on the designer: “Before putting pencil to paper, she interviewed workers—not just the bosses—to understand how they spent their time and moved around the office.” (You might even call this approach “life-centered design,” which is discussed in a previous edition of Business x Design.)
She was a woman with Big Ideas, and, somewhat remarkably for the era, she got to push them through to fruition. Take her philosophy on furniture design compared to other design icons, explained by Knoll Bassett herself in “The Knoll Transcripts” from Art Papers:
“I saw the development of furniture in sense of need. Charlie Eames and George Nelson saw it more in the sense of an individual piece. When I say need, I mean for a total job. I would say to Eero [Saarinen], for example, ‘There isn’t a decent office chair, swivel chair, we need one. That’s what we must do.’ Charlie designed a chair from the same interest, of course, but they designed more as individual pieces rather than as a cohesive thing for a whole job.”
Knoll Bassett turned this kind of need-based design thinking into Knoll’s Planning Unit, an in-house interiors service through which designers would outfit corporate offices based on that specific company’s work patterns. Based on research and principles of modernism, the Planning Unit gave flexible, open, and light-filled offices to giants like CBS and Cowles, publisher of the defunct Look magazine.
It’s hard to consider Knoll Bassett’s techniques and not think about the year’s biggest story on the topic of office space. WeWork’s calamitous fall from a $47 billion valuation to real-estate scrapyard came with a slew of casualties in the design world. In November, for AD Pro, I reported on the fallout for WeWork’s interior designers and architects—an impressive group of thinkers working at the frontier of data-driven design and construction. One former designer told me about using building information modeling to pinpoint information relevant to a worker’s happiness, such as where sunlight would fall across a desk; a former VP talked about cutting-edge prefab components. It was equal parts moving and dispiriting to hear about this class of designers, thinking about the future of work at a company that mismanaged their opportunity to do so. But those employees were also Big Idea designers, and Big Idea people cannot be stopped.
Following in Knoll Bassett’s footsteps are other designers and entrepreneurs who understand that the way we work—and therefore, the space where we work—is changing. From flexible offices for startups from newcomer Knotel to the rapid expansion of The Wing’s women-only professional spaces, there’s plenty more of this kind of innovation to watch for in 2020.
See more design news below.
Margaret Rhodes
VISION, EMPATHY, SCALE
Ride halt. New York just dealt a big blow to the micro-mobility industry. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo vetoed a bill that would have allowed shared e-scooters and electric bicycles on the road, citing inadequate safety measures, such as the lack of requirements for scooter riders to wear helmets. His decision is logical—several people have died in e-scooter accidents, and hundreds have sustained injuries—but the way the bill bundled e-scooters and electric bikes is unfortunate. Those two devices serve two very different use cases: The former lets users—typically tourists, many of whom end up being people who have been drinking—bypass pricier Uber or Lyft rides; the latter is already widely used in New York City by food-delivery workers faced with demanding schedules. [The New York Times]
Video games. YouTube has faced a storm of criticism surrounding its unwillingness to intervene when it comes to what kid viewers see—or don’t see—on the platform. A recent deep dive into the company reveals that the video giant explored screening every video targeted towards kids under the age of 8 in the YouTube Kids app. Code-named Crosswalk, the project looked into hand-picking moderated content for children. Unfortunately for many, YouTube ended up following its longstanding pattern of ceding responsibility to content creators and users, and abandoned the initiative. Selecting videos is something a media company would do; YouTube still sees itself as a neutral platform. [Bloomberg]
Branded content. From the sweeping overhaul of the Google logo to the public-relations crash that was the Gap rebrand (see both via the link below), the 2010s saw many a redesign. The decade also saw the rise of a micro-genre of online commentary, known as logo criticism. Something about a decade of staring at phone screens decorated with apps—which are, essentially, compressed logos—and an unfettered ability to express yourself on Twitter and Instagram means that now, more than ever, people really care about brand redesigns. Getting a graphic-design makeover is now a big business decision that consumers have personal stakes in. Check out several companies that took the plunge. [Fast Company]
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
These Books Will Help You Understand the Relationship Between Human and Machine by Clay Chandler
Rwanda is Bringing Tech Buzz to Africa by Richard Morgan
Tesla’s Cybertruck Preorders Don’t Tell the Whole Story by David Z. Morris
The Business of Rare: Why Restaurants Love Investing in Limited Quantity Items by Billy Lyons
Why Workplace A.I. Needs a Human Touch by Gwen Moran
DISCUSSION
A bill in Northern Virginia has reignited one of this year’s oft-visited national conversations around urban planning in the era of tech giants. CityLab reports that if passed, the bill would address affordable housing issues by legalizing duplex housing in places that have so far banned it. Lawmakers don’t seek an outright ban on single-family dwellings so much as a way to eke out a bit more density—ostensibly making room for residents to work at the new Amazon headquarters. The situation calls to mind California’s challenge to house tech workers in a landscape of deeply entrenched single-family zoning laws.
This year, government officials and journalists alike found themselves considering the ethics and cost of single-family houses. The trouble, of course, is a mix of NIMBY-ism and good old-fashioned ideas about the American Dream. “Single-family zoning is practically gospel in America,” said The New York Times’ Upshot column in June. “Should we still be building single-family houses?” asked journalist Kate Wagner, writing for Curbed this month. She goes on:
“The single-family house is both an agent of gentrification (through flipping and real estate speculation) and a site of neighborhood resistance for those who own their homes but are still at risk of being economically displaced. That many existing single-family homes could be densified by adding accessory dwelling units or by breaking them up into apartments makes it impossible to see single-family homes as either purely good or purely bad—or to ignore their potential to address some of the problems we face.”
Like a lot of deeply ingrained, quintessentially American behaviors—driving a car, or eating beef, for example—the idea of a house with a yard and privacy may be almost impossible for many to give up. Which is why Wagner’s point above, and bills like the one up for consideration in Virginia, come with a glimmer of promise. There’s a middle ground to be had. It might not come with a picket fence, but it could make communities disrupted by tech more livable for more people.