It’s a matter of Privacy..
Over the past few months, we’ve been chipping away at a side project here at Formworks, now we’re keen to share our concept with you, the public, to get some feedback and also give you a small glimpse into our design process.
Working From Home (WFH) exploded into our lives during the nationwide lockdown whether we liked it or not. Now, it seems WFH is going to be a major part of our collective lives moving forward. We identified that the average office worker had a number of elements lacking in their WFH home office during lockdown, making their jobs more difficult and less comfortable. Near the top of this list was the physical working environment. People need separation (both physically and mentally); an area where they can escape distractions (both visible and audible), and feel like they are sitting in their office rather than their lounge.
We thought this sounded like a problem worth solving.
Early on in the process we decided to focus our efforts on a built-in solution rather than a standalone solution. Research and common sense told us that there is a trend towards high-density housing, with young professionals moving into apartments and row-houses in large cities, with many of these houses having little room for a WFH office space. This is the market we are targeting with this concept. We want to create a long-lasting, high-quality product that will really add value to its users over the long-term.
Through our concept development, we learned a number of things. The primary concern from the users we spoke to was claustrophobia. While some of these people described the concepts as looking cozy, just as many felt they looked dark and imposing. After a number of iterations, we settled on the louvre-style concept shown below. The openings in this concept allow natural light to pass through while not giving direct line-of-sight to the rest of the room.
We chose to use felt in our concepts for its acoustic properties and its homey feel. Felt is available in rigid panels which allows us to reduce the complexity and overall part count by using the felt panel itself to provide structure.
We created a simplified scale model in the studio to get hands-on with the concept and to prove and demonstrate the motion of the mechanism. As always, the physical model proved to be invaluable; within 5 minutes of assembling the model we identified a number of small adjustments to make to improve the experience.
We are still working on this concept and hope to take it to the next stage of prototyping and testing soon, but we would love to hear your feedback. Would a privacy screen like this suit your WFH needs? Is there something we’ve missed? Send us a DM on Instagram @formworksdesign and let us know!
Alternatively if you’d be interested in exploring this design with us further then get in touch -> studio@formworksdesign.com
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