Collaboration is key to an innovative, social, and creative working culture. This is something we all know.

However, the way we work, strangely is a bit like when we first used a mobile phone. It came with step-by-step instructions on how to use it, it was new to us, but now we just get the phone, and start to play. It’s instinctive, so much so, we now try find the best way, the quirkiest way, that we can get it to do, what we want it to do.

That play, that fast failing, is very much part of modern working, the scrum and the sprint, the sit stands, or daily stand ups, these are the basis of the agile workplace — where play becomes more important in daily working live.

When people feel in control, they’re more productive, so let’s make it easy for people to feel in control of their everyday work pattern through direct control of the furniture. Enabling them to organise their immediate space at will.

Think of a desk, with four sides, you only ever use one side, the furniture structure restricts your use of it, ironically it means that your use of that piece is very linear.

To make teams more agile, mobile, and social — let’s start to think how we can use all sides of furniture so that we can allow people to use all sides, to make teams and agile spaces.

Furniture has been always been a single use product, a desk, a screen, a storage unit. But what if we started to think about having all those items together, a shared common use that can give every user one shared and equal space.

To further these ideas, furniture needs to be not only structurally but visually, and aesthetically, light in its appearance, to encourage users to easily move and configure on demand.

Contemporary colours, finishes and materials help relate these products to younger audiences and more diverse workplaces.

Colour and finish have influence on more than just aesthetics, they influence our mood. If we use colour as a means to promote activity, we can make it easier for a conversation to take place. Conversations leads to collaborate and once we get to collaboration, it leads to innovation.

These ideas and theories inspired so much, we took one step further and condensed them down into a collection of products that we call Play. The Play collection consists; tables, chairs, storage, and more. They can be used collectively or individually but at its core Play has been designed to facilitate agile working.

Written by Adrian Campbell
Workplace Consultant of The Senator Group

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