By Roger Hockett Humans have always been concerned with impressions. Study ancient tribal dress customs and you can verify this. However, when ancient deer hunters fashioned hunting spears, style was irrelevant, the business end of the spear was totally functional and made of the highest quality stone or metal possible. Similarly home-office users express concerns about function and quality. However, the market shows that style is by far the winner over function, and quality runs a distant third, despite professed interests to the contrary. Home-office workers are very keen at convincing themselves that the wobbly little particle board desk at the mass merchant is really ergonomic, or that the antique writing desk is suitable for computer work. I am not talking about home-offices where paying the bills and cruising the net as a hobby is the prime focus. I'm talking about daily work environments. I was recently invited by a leading "home style" magazine to do the home office in their annual "Architectural Home of The Year". Their idea of an office consisted of a tiny built-in shelf on the landing between the bedrooms of the two active teenagers. The theory was everyone could meet on the landing and "interact", it would be great for family togetherness! Computer ergonomics, privacy, quietness, areas to conference with children, congestion, work envelope, etc. were not relevant factors. In Seattle's latest "Street of Dreams" house show only two of the dozen entries had working offices, the rest were traditional image rooms - a la your rich uncle's cigar smoking den. In the last two years I have counted over a dozen articles in major home publications touting the "best in home office design". Most of them neglected function and quality, and displayed non-existent computer ergonomics. Several were actually dangerous (RSI wise). Designing for home-office customers in 1996 requires a reality check of what customers and the media understand to be "quality ergonomic work furniture" and what role the furniture designer in 1996 can play in that environment. You would think that home office users would look at their offices like a journeyman tradesman who buys his tools with an eye to durability, features, ergonomics, accuracy, etc. However, American style and taste priorities dictate four major priorities (beyond children) for disposable income: 1) automobiles (you are what you drive) 2) landscaping/ remodeling 3) home entertainment electronics 4) travel Anything left gets apportioned among hundreds of other products and services competing for the consumer's attention. Its hard to find $1,000 to $2,000 for a workstation that you sit at eight hours a day...ergo the $399 cubby desk. Furniture has fallen dramatically on the priority list of purchase goals of Americans not just because of a switch in life styles. A variety of economic factors have contributed to a well documented thinning of the middle classes. Unexciting and bland furniture products have been shoved aside by ferocious marketing campaigns of the mass merchant lions in the home entertainment industry. The siren song of "nothing down, no interest, and no payments till ии" has absolutely hammered specialty furniture retailers who are without economies of scale, financial resources, or exciting media campaigns to compete for the disposable income of consumers. I recently discussed home office with a fellow who admitted to being deeply in debt after buying on credit a big screen TV for $2,500 and now could not afford the office his work really demanded. Then there is the legitimate need to outfit the house with computer technology, especially to keep the kids competitive in the knowledge race. Whack off another $1,500 to $2,500 of disposable income for that. Throw in job insecurity from corporate down sizing of office workers (the natural clientele for home office), and even if the salary and desire for a good home office is there, wisdom cautions consumers to hold back. The early 1990's saw an acceptance of the validity and value of ergonomics in the American office. There was the great San Francisco Ordinance Hype. The media proclaimed that soon regulations would wrap all office workers in requirements for adjustable, ergonomic workstations. The ordinance was easily repealed. Then came the Gingrich revolution and OSHA's unexpected crash. Don't expect any dramatic OSHA enforcement of a new ANSI standard for at least 3 to 5 years, if ever. Solutions to office ergonomics issues will remain far behind our approach to industrial ergonomics in construction and factory environments. Only litigation remains as a national policy to address office ergonomics. The term "ergonomics" is a loosely defined and applied term. Consumers are barraged with ads proclaiming that every desk is ergonomic because it has a pull out breadboard shelf for the keyboard or lots of cubby holes. There are no nationally understood standards on office ergonomics for consumers to use. Unlike the computer industry, with its no holds barred reviews of technology, furniture publications tend towards "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil". None of them want to offend by critiquing ergonomic deficiencies in the products of their advertisers. Thus the consumer operates on incomplete information and must learn the hard way via trail and error. In addition, many people just don't understand the importance of ergonomics. I have worked with managers in furniture factories producing adjustable workstations and not a single person in our office staff was outfitted with an ergonomic workstation. Many, many times I have visited cutting edge digital imaging companies doing work for big name clients and witnessed computer workers at folding banquet tables with water pipe insulation strapped to the edge to keep the sharp T-molding from irritating their wrists at the carpal tunnel. The owners were totally oblivious to the needs of their highly trained knowledge workers. We are the first generation to reach retirement age having worked intensively at computers in a sedentary pose. Our hunting and gathering conditioned bodies are not doing well if the rise in RSI injuries is true. Thats the bad news. The good news is that several market and technology developments can assist furniture designers and marketers to get around some of the problems covered herein. Large furniture firms compete on a price-driven basis, using economies of scale, extensive distribution networks, and minimal disruption of manufacturing processes. The result is product blandness and low quality, but at affordable prices. This creates an opportunity for innovative furniture designers who can bring to market new, interesting, ergonomic products that are somewhat more expensive but still within the budgets of the top half of furniture consumers. The question is how can you do this? CAD, CAM, CNC, WWW...alphabet soup right? These buzz words relate directly to four key variables of short run furniture design and marketing: cost, quality, flexibility, and awareness. C o s t : Lower product costs are now achievable by quickly designing on CAD, transferring into CAM, and immediately CNC machining the parts as a group in a work center. The old method of hand drawings, manual proto-typing, re-engineering for shop floor specifications, setting up multiple machines, and scheduling through several departments is tremendously simplified by the new approach. CAD power and ease of use have increased and software costs have fallen dramatically in the last five years. CAM and CNC are rapidly being introduced into woodworking shops and factories. However, the designer has to understand the process and technology to design effectively for this approach an issue for an upcoming article. Q u a l i t y : Quality control in large furniture factories with lots of hand labor and multiple departments and machine set-ups is absolutely scary. As a production manager at just such a facility, I could sit in my office and envision how many screw ups were in process at any given moment. A CNC furniture kit is all controlled at the CAD design end, assuming you are working closely with the manufacturer to interpret correctly what is inherent in the CAD drawings and what that implies for CNC set ups and fixturing. This affords near perfect quality by the second or third part run. You will occasionally experience loss of vacuum, incorrect placement of raw stock, etc. but this can be easily planned for in the part documentation. F l e x i b i l i t y : Now we are really cooking! As our market feeds backs to us the need for product alterations, additions, new options, etc. we can quickly respond using our CAD/CAM/CNC process and show our customers the benefit of doing business with a small firm over the mass merchant. With a marketing program sensitive to personalizing the communication with the customer we now have a powerful ability to build a loyal relationship with our customer. In the eyes of our consumer we seem to be, and in fact are, "wired up" and much more responsive than the large factory, rep, dealer network where customer questions are a distraction to volume selling. A w a r e n e s s : A small woodworking firm has lots of customers out there...reaching them efficiently is the challenge. A narrow product niche allows minimal advertising to alert your buyers where you are. With more general products the costs per lead generated is prohibitive. Magazine ads run from $1,500 to $10,000 per month, and must be booked months in advance, and if the ad doesn't immediately generate a spike in orders the marketing budget is shot. The web offers a whole sea change from this old media marketing paradigm. I used to get in my car and go search for: hard to find CD recordings (Boulevard Music), marketing info on woodworking as a hobby (Electric Library), hotel reservations (Best Western & the family vacation), airline tickets (SW Airlines), concert tickets (TicketMaster), UPS shipping charge estimates, weather radar maps (Pacific Ocean area), Seattle traffic conditions, vendor sources (Thomas Register on-line), and on and on. In the 14 months since our web site went on-line, we have sold over $30,000 of workstations, sight unseen, as a result. We are almost through a complete redesign and a whole new web marketing plan to increase our exposure rate. The costs to do all of this are minuscule compared to ad graphics, ad costs, literature design and printing, mailing fulfillment, etc. And time-wise its lightening fast! So when you combine the CNC manufacturing with rapid product design, and web marketing costing only pennies to reach customers, the big guys can't do anything to stop you. Previously prohibitive costs are shrinking the where a small manufacturer/designer can afford to compete on a level equal to much larger operations. Getting an interesting product to market, inexpensively, is still the name of the game, and its more competitive than ever. But innovative approaches to every aspect of design, production and promotion makes for a game that an even a little guy can win. Roger Hockett, President, WorkSpaces Inc. 14311 Southeast 77 Court Newcastle, WA 98059 tel: 206.226.4398 fax: 206.226.9468 E-mail: rogerh@workspaces.com Web Site: http://www.workspaces.com