Tuning the Workplace: The Herman Miller Research Corporation and the Architectonics of Information

In the 1960s and 70s, architects and designers looked to the sciences for inspiration and a systematic approach to shaping environments rich in information. This is particularly evident in an approach promoted by the Herman Miller Research Corporation (HMRC), a division of the iconic furniture manufacturer. In 1968, HMRC launched an influential open-office management concept called Action Office. Promising to adapt the workplace to a new era of “knowledge workers” and invoking concepts in management, human sciences and engineering, its developers claimed to tackle problems of information overload, declining productivity and employee satisfaction. Within a decade, the concept got implemented in hundreds of corporate, governmental and public service offices and research laboratories. Focusing on the period 1959 to 1976, this paper catalogues and analyses the firm’s efforts to study, rationalize and measure white-collar creativity and productivity, and in so doing legitimate a discursive and material re-arrangement of the office. In particular, it shows how HMRC researchers drew together concepts and methodological approaches from emerging subdisciplines such as ergonomics, proxemics, environmental psychology and psychoacoustics to develop an embodied model of information processing and recalibrate workers’ comfort, creativity, and exposure to information stimuli—on paper as much as in their social, visual and acoustic surroundings. This paper explores how their efforts to shape and validate such effects on white-collar work contributed to broader transformations in notions of information and productivity, and produced a template, both for a particular approach to corporate research and for future imaginations of the workspace.