Good Offices and Beyond:
The Evolution of the Workplace
October 4, 1994 through February 26, 1995

Reprinted by permission of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
2 East 91st Street New York, New York 10128

Just two decades ago, the word office conjured up interior spaces that ranged from luxurious upper-management suites to warehouse-like secretarial pools filled with endless rows of identical desks with chromed legs and fake-wood tops, beige or black type-writers, an array of staplers, staple removers, and paper clips, in and out baskets, unwieldy stacks of yellow pads, and boxes of messy carbon paper. Each task in the office was shaped and described by these artifacts of labor: for upper management, tools were hidden in a drawer (if they existed at all); for office drones, the landscape of desk was littered as a battlefield.

With dramatic developments in electronics, and with the adoption of the computer as part of our work armament, today’s "office” doesn’t even necessarily exist as a single defined space, but is, rather, wherever one’s work is accomplished. The task-driven tools of past decades have now been collapsed into small portable computer “clipboard,” and today’s office can be located in the home, on a plane, or even a street corner. Changing attitudes and needs in the workplace, and some of the tools and machines designed to meet these demands, are examined in the exhibition of Good Offices and Beyond: The Evolution of the Workplace. The exhibition features many of the designs that helped to define our desk tops in the 1970s and ‘80s, a period in which the old office began to give way to new computerized technology. While the materials and forms of office tools and equipment have changed in response to innovations in technology and materials, the basic needs of office work provide a telling link between the office of the future and our offices of the past. Good Offices and Beyond: The Evolution of the Workplace looks selectively at some major areas of the office design, such as the variety of tools necessary to manage paper (holders, sorters, organizers): to manage time and numbers (calendars and calculators); to manage, transmit, and record information (recorders, typewriters, fax machines, and telephones): and to manipulate other objects (staplers, pen and pencil trays, tape dispensers, etc.). This exhibition has been developed around a juried collection of office equipment, tools, and machines assembled as Good offices: The Seventh Arango International Design Exhibition, in 1990, and shown in Pasadena and Montreal. This collection was generously donated to the permanent collections of modern design at the National Design Museum. While featuring this recent acquisition, the exhibition also suggests the historical context of tools for the office and includes other office and work-related objects from the Museum’s permanent collection.