The tables are turning: Steelcase Bivi

Of all the surfaces in an office, there is one that is undoubtedly the most important: the table. The basis upon which most company processes run, the table is the dock that facilitates the constant movement of people and things. Not only is it the place where employees arrive and their point of interface with their tasks, but also where they connect with colleagues and exchange ideas. Tables are where energy flows and gets recharged – not just into smartphones and laptops, but between people and as new input into work processes. They are short-term ports at which employees repeatedly anchor as they navigate ever-changing situations over the course of the workday.

Although a regular fixture of office-architecture, the table can also be completely reconceived in terms of modularity, flexibility and adaptability. As if to prove exactly this point, Steelcase has developed the Bivi modular table system. Its creation began as the manufacturer started extending its research antennae into the work-world in which ideas are known to go in all directions – the organisational culture of start-ups.

From this sphere, Steelcase gathered the input to improve the output that office design can trigger. Bivi doesn’t just open up new perspectives on office architecture, it also enables an innovative architecture of the work processes themselves. A table whose very design embodies change thus becomes a piece of furniture that can support and propel change in companies and organisations, too. As a table, Bivi can be many things at once, but also many things in succession. A surface that can be redefined whenever the table takes on a new task. Bivi connects teams and strengthens their exchange. At the table, one focuses their attention on one or the other – or sometimes to oneself, when the focus shifts away from the ideas circulating among colleagues and to those circling in one’s own mind.

Bivi puts itself in the service of the task, subordinating itself to whatever process it is called upon to support. Use it as a high table with participants standing or pull up a chair so users can sit and immerse themselves more deeply in the matter at hand. Either way, it is a piece of furniture that sets impulses into motion.

Yet while Bivi adapts to wide-ranging situations, it also adapts to the people involved in them, as a form of expression of their respective personalities – on the one hand, of the many individuals who use the table in their own distinctive ways and, on the other, of the essential character traits that bind them, namely those of the company. Bivi can assume an open stance or, equally, draw a boundary (particularly a visual one, for example by means of a screen). It can also aesthetically underscore a personal or group identity through a multitude of options, colours and materials which can be used to reflect individual lifestyles as well as a collective company philosophy.

But above all, Bivi traces a current development – when life and work merge, the table is where they intersect. Bivi can accommodate a mountain bike, serve as a skateboard garage or provide necessary storage space.

In terms of both space and convention, many offices and their configuration are firmly locked in place. Yet innovations often arise if breaking the routine is part of the routine, and so Steelcase took a close, hard look at where unconventional thinking is on the daily agenda – at the offices of successful start-ups.

And the research showed the way these offices operate can indeed be distilled down to a handful of shared features characterising a culture and a spirit of innovation. Their spaces and tabletops are filled with passion for what one does as well as possibilities for spatial, human, conceptual and content-related networking.

The employees of successful start-ups enjoy one freedom especially: being themselves, even when moored at their workplace because how and where they work is usually left up to them. Bivi is therefore built to respond to the individual needs of the people who sit down to work at it.

When everyone can be themselves, something in common emerges and creates a sense of community. The Bivi table system opens up a great deal of space for this feeling, in part because it responds to every phase of the day and the project – whether this requires sitting, standing, a lounge configuration, open docking mode or an enclosed island topography.

© Architonic