A New Century of Innovation

The Industry at a Crossroads

The office furniture industry is mature, consolidated, and overdue for reinvention. With remote work, AI, and massive social shifts reshaping daily life, this is a time of upheaval that demands bold, principled design thinking. The call to action is for designers and manufacturers to stop riding old rails and start imagining what the next century of work and life actually needs.

The office furniture industry is undergoing significant change. While the pandemic accelerated the WFH/RTO debate, technology-enabled new workstyles have been on the rise for a decade. The industry itself, largely based on centralized offices defined by the industrial age, is mature and ripe for innovation.

A Mature Industry at a Tipping Point

The industry itself is about 100 years old, and consolidation is an indicator of market maturity. We’ve seen major competitors that helped define the space (HNI, 78 years old; Steelcase, 113; Herman Miller, 103; Knoll, 87; Haworth, 78) consolidated from five to three. Beyond the HNI-Steelcase and MillerKnoll mergers, Haworth, the other largest competitor, has also grown through acquisition, as have large furniture dealerships. Megadealers have more sway than ever, even with their exclusive, aligned manufacturer relationships, and are larger than many smaller manufacturers. When a company or an entire industry is at the top of a growth curve, market players are forced to make new decisions.

These changes are making the industry wobble.

Our research shows that, beyond trade policy and economic uncertainty, the top concerns of many manufacturers are sales growth, price pressure, and continued demand for greater operational efficiency. As the market shifts and contracts, companies feel squeezed to connect with more customers while maintaining or growing margins.

Still Riding Two Rails

Over the last century, the biggest industry innovations have come from systems products (1960s) and ergonomic seating (1980s), primarily focused on office worker productivity. While there have been many good ideas, technologies, product refinements and improvements, and market diversification since then, the industry mostly continues to ride these two rails of its industrial roots.

The most divergent trend beyond systems and ergonomics may come from fashion. As competitors enter consumer markets and traditional core products give way to accessories, performance parity has become ubiquitous, and style has become currency. Fashion carries its own themes, including identity, projecting modernity, but also disposability and sustainability. There are plenty of opportunities in consumer goods, but we want our infrastructure to last longer than our clothing.

What the Bauhaus Was, Why It Matters Now

Informed designers are familiar with the Bauhaus, a groundbreaking German art and design school in the early 20th century that reshaped modern architecture, graphic design, and everyday objects by uniting art, craft, and industrial production. When the Nazis closed the school in 1933, many Bauhaus innovators fled Germany and became educators in the United States, helping to define modern architectural and design education at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Black Mountain College, and the IIT Institute of Design (known as The New Bauhaus).

The influence of the Bauhaus continues to impact built environments to this day. The Bauhaus philosophy partly gave rise to what became known as mid-century modernism, or its current cousin, Scandinavian design. Today’s aesthetic feels softer and friendlier than Bauhaus’s harder, industrial edge, but they share the same modernist DNA.

The key innovations of contract furniture can be traced to Bauhaus design logic, which viewed furniture as a tool for modern life. Office systems and ergonomic chairs were once a new idea.

Furniture as modern equipment
Prototypes for mass production
Modularity and standardization
Truth in material and structure
Human-centered measurement (early ergonomics)
From “total design” to workplace ecosystems

We Are at a Similar Tipping Point

As we look ahead, we should remember what gave rise to the Bauhaus in the first place. What may seem like an esoteric style was actually a response to great social upheaval. Several forces converged in Germany after World War I that made the Bauhaus feel urgent and necessary, including a need for practical rebuilding, industrialized mass production, a desire to break from decadent ornamentation, and new educational theories of learning by doing. Broadly, there was a desire to help define a new modern culture.

We are at a similar tipping point today.

Look around. It’s not hard to see the tectonic shifts. Between remote work changing the nature of downtown spaces, the sharing economy changing the nature of ownership, social media changing the nature of communications, climate change changing our relationship with nature itself, not to mention how robotics, artificial intelligence, automation, and whatever else that brings may change much of daily life, we need new paradigms. We are obliged to meet the challenges of the new century: Technology, globalization, affordable housing, educational pedagogy and practice, and today’s version of designing for mass society.

The contract furniture industry, and the built environment broadly, could use a reboot. We don’t need to rely on Bauhaus styles to learn from its principles.

Eight Principles for a New Century

Unite art, craft, and industry: Artists and makers working together; design suited to modern production. Are we collaborating effectively to create innovative solutions?
Function and use drive form: Clarity, purpose, and practical performance over decoration. What are today’s functions we aim to support?
Truth to materials and structure: Let construction and materials read honestly. How might new materials create new opportunities?
Simplicity, geometry, and visual order: Reduction, proportion, legibility. How might we find simplicity on the other side of complexity?
Design for everyday life: Housing, furniture, objects, graphics, improving daily living. How are we living today? How do we want to live in the future?
Standardization and reproducibility: Prototypes that can be mass-produced, affordability as a value. How might we meet customers where they are?
Learning by doing: Workshops, experimentation, iterative making. How are we allowing for innovation?
Total design/unified environment: Coherent systems across objects, interiors, buildings, and graphics. How are everyday patterns of life changing? What are we seeking to support?

Are furniture designers or manufacturers going to solve these problems? Perhaps not, but we each have a role to play.

It’s Time to Lay New Tracks

This is a call to action for designers and manufacturers to think bigger.

Our industry comprises designers, makers, craftspeople, space planners, stylists, businesspeople, researchers, writers, thinkers, and more. We have the horsepower to do new work. The term “Horsepower” was a marketing-friendly way to convey the power of steam engines in the late 18th century. How might we convey our future potential in today’s terms? How might we adopt future-oriented ideas today? We are creatures of habit, so change is hard. The longer you’ve been riding the same rails, the harder it is to change tracks. It’s time to lay new tracks. Let’s be realistic about where we are, but envision where we might go.

A century ago, the Bauhaus addressed unmet societal needs and offered a vision of the future. In the end, it was just a small school with big ideas. Others carried the best ideas forward. As the saying goes, change happens slowly, and then all at once. The Bauhaus was only open for 14 years. The Beatles and Van Gogh produced work for only about a decade, yet we’re still talking about their influence. It may not take so long to make a mark.

A century ago, it would’ve been hard for small furniture manufacturers to envision where we are today, but they planted seeds that continue to bear fruit. Today’s furniture industry incumbents are leaders for a reason. Startups led, others followed. Leading takes courage and the willingness to take risks.

The next century will not be marked by maturity, consolidation, and decline, but rather reinvention, breakthrough ideas, and growth. As we move from industrialization to digitization, let’s envision a future in which we play a critical role in people's lives through the built environment, just as our predecessors did a hundred years ago.

Originally published by Office Insight.