The new digital issue of Works magazine would look just dandy on your screen

The new digital issue of Works magazine is available for you here. In this issue: we report from Orgatec with mixed feelings; we have four project stories from Toronto, Salford and London; interviews with Karim Rashid and Oskar Zieta; consider how the 21st Century Office has its roots in 20th Century Holland; ask where all the furniture icons went; profile Future Designs; and all the regular commentary, company news and features you need. 

Welcome

In the period leading up to Orgatec, during the show itself and even after the event, one conversation has cropped up over and over again: will there be/is there/was there anything truly different on show? Will Europe’s biggest furniture brands emerge from the creative doldrums of Covid and produce another ‘Aeron moment’, we wondered. The answer is, quite unequivocally, no.

Now I’m not suggesting that Orgatec offered up nothing in terms of interesting, smart, functional and even thought-provoking products – it just didn’t give us enough and certainly didn’t throw out many ‘wow’ moments. Where was the provocative? Where was the truly conceptual? Where was the fun?

You’ll see from our review of the show, later in this issue, that there were a number of companies who introduced new designs that certainly caught the eye, while a couple of others presented their latest wares in brilliantly innovative ways, but we still came away from Cologne asking ourselves whether we’ve hit and past the peak era of workplace innovation. Have we reached saturation? Is there anything truly unique still brewing in the minds of the sector’s leading product designers – or should companies be looking outside of the market for truly innovative developments/creations?

I know that this all takes time, money and no little courage (especially in a challenging market), as well as a touch of genius, but if furniture markets can’t tick all those boxes, then maybe they shouldn’t bother trying – or more specifically, they shouldn’t be telling us that they are achieving all this when they are clearly nowhere near.

Maybe it’s just us. Maybe we’ve reached that age. Maybe we should just shut up and stop sounding like broken records – although we do also spend far too much of our time complaining about how there’s nothing really new in music. Our parents used to say the same thing about music though – and this was way before Aeron was even a spark in the minds of Messrs Stumpf and Chadwick!

Mick Jordan

Editor, Works Magazine