Herman Miller's Creative Network

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

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Can you share any takeaways from that trip?

We learned that the Herman Miller brand does mean something in China and that a growing appreciation and respect for good design exists there. It also became clear that we were going to have to create some design very specific to that marketplace and we would have to hire local people, both on the design and management side to really understand the Chinese culture and be sensitive to it.

Herman Miller still abides by the environmental values of your founder D.J. DePree. What formed his beliefs?

To paraphrase DePree: 'Ultimately businesses will be judged by their contribution to humanity and we have a duty to be good stewards of the environment.' D.J. had a deep sense that we don't really own these resources in the long run, we simply are borrowing them, and we need to pass them on to future generations in good order. That's the underpinning of Herman Miller's environmental values. Aside from the moral obligation, there's an economic return, if we're good at it. We have 10 target goals set for 2010 that we call "The Power of Ten." They are part of our ultimate "2020 Vision" of leaving no operational footprint on the environment by the year 2020. A second commitment is that 50% of our sales must come from products that meet the Design for the Environment protocol (DFE) established with the help of Bill McDonough, Michael Braungart and their Cradle-to-Cradle principles. Our Mirra chair was the first non-textile product to meet DFE in our industry. Now we require all of our new products to go through DFE analysis before they're launched.

For decades, Herman Miller has shaped the office workplace. How do you see it evolving, and is the open plan office still relevant?

Open plan offices are not going to go away, but I think we are going to see much more of a mixed landscape that will vary not only by company, but by areas within a company and who those users are. One size won't fit all. That's why among our newer products you can see My Studio Environment, focused on people who need to do individual work and need an element of controllable privacy, and Vivo, a frame-and-tile office system. By the way, it is important that these two products can work together harmoniously. At the same time, neither invalidates what we did with Resolve, which is a more extreme move toward collaboration. All of these systems fit within the portfolio of who we are and you'll continue to see more products that fit in those kind of more temporal areas that are neither private offices, open plan nor conference rooms. The one overall trend that we're starting to see is a less mechanistic feel to the way offices are put together. They'll become more organic. They'll have more of a residential quality in some ways.

Where does the home office fit into your scheme? Didn't the company enter this segment a decade ago?

When we relaunched our residential business in '94, we were probably ahead of the curve. Part of the reason was the technology infrastructure wasn't there. You had a clunky dial-up connection that made it slow to upload and download files. Today, people can't tell if you're at home or in the office. We will see more of a blurring. I also think there will be as much of a need to ask how you are going to deal with the mobility between all of those locations. Our drive is not just to ask how we solve issues of the home and home office, which we do have an interest in, but how we can address issues that people are going to deal with between the home, the office, and that other place.