Herman Miller's Creative Network

CEO Brian Walker talks about tapping the furniture company's creative network for insights and breakthrough ideas

Convia is a modular, programmable sub-building infrastructure system. Shown here: a schematic that illustrates the application of that electrical infrastructure.

Vivo is a recent frame-and-tile office system by Herman Miller.

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Herman Miller CEO Brian Walker talks with Corporate Design Foundation Chairman Peter Lawrence about tapping the creative network for insights and breakthrough ideas.

Herman Miller has a long tradition of working with design consultants like Charles Eames, Isamu Noguchi, and George Nelson. Why an external creative network rather than an in-house design staff?

The driver for us is our commitment to new ideas and solutions. This external network ensures that we are always taking a fresh look at problems faced by our customers without subjecting it to our own filters. If you have only an internal design staff, even an enormously talented one, you are inherently limited by their existing world view and experiences. Our ability to tap into a broader outside network lets us revisit and reinvent our own filters on a regular basis and get a fresh perspective on existing or emerging problems. This approach has its challenges, but it often leads to the best ideas and breakthroughs. Our creative network is at the core of Herman Miller's DNA.

Herman Miller has continued to partner with some of today's great designers.

Yes. A huge contributor for decades was Bill Stumpf, who received the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Product Design in 2006, just prior to his passing away. People like Ayse Birsel, Eric Chan, Yves Behar, Studio 7.5 Berlin and others have continued to extend our design tradition.

Is there a secret to working well with outside designers?

The central thing that we've learned is a willingness to follow and give ourselves over to these designers—not lose ourselves, but be open to following them to places that we may question in the beginning. We give our creative network an outline of a perceived problem and let them share their insights as to whether we're on the right path and then enable them to bring their own gifts to the search for a solution. We follow them in their journey without judging too quickly. One of the hardest things to do is not to judge too quickly, based on the first physical appearance of something. Instead, we try to understand the essence of what they're describing in physical form, written form or sketches.

The genius of Herman Miller's R&D folks is in knowing how to put the right constraints in place so that we end up not only with a great statement of design, a great innovation, but something that solves real problems for customers and has commercial value. It's easy in some ways to come up with great designs that don't have commercial value, but to have great design that solves real problems and creates commercial value, that's where the genius comes in. That's where our R&D people make their real contribution; it's their ability to know how to put the right constraints in place to push the creative network to a different place.

Herman Miller is known for pioneering work in consumer research, including "global scenario planning." What is it?

Every few years, we do global-scale scenario planning, where we look out a number of years and create multiple visions of how we think the world may change. We ask ourselves, if the world did evolve along one of those paths, how would that affect the way people work, live, and feel? These scenarios give us vectors on which to explore new potential problems and new solutions. Solving problems is where our design work begins. We rarely start off saying, 'We just want a chair in this price point.' More often, we say, 'Here's a problem area that we see for folks. How do we solve it?' Around here we often quote George Nelson, our lead designer in the '40s and '50s, who used to say, 'Design is a response to social change.'