Herman Miller's new Compass line of healthcare furniture, designed in collaboration with Boston's Continuum design consultancy, recently took the Gold Award at NeoCon. The key innovation of the system is that everything mounts on special rails installed into the wall, which has multiple benefits. Chief among these is that furniture pieces are lifted up off of the floor. Researchers noticed that the typical hospital patient does not "bring their Spring wardrobe" along with them, meaning large storage space is not needed; yet most case-good furniture installed in hospitals is of standard depth, and if it were made more shallow, there's a danger it would tip over. Compass' wall-mounting system alleviates this, and their shallower depths provide more space for caregivers to move around.
Another neat detail is the way the edges of the system are designed to reduce the risk of infection: If anything should spill on a horizontal surface of a Compass component, it rolls off the edge and straight down to the floor (and not into a drawer, thanks to a careful selection of angles), where it's easy to mop up.
Here's a video of designer Gianfranco Zaccai describing the system. (For those interested in design research, there's a separate Compass video on the subject here.)
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