Could a piece of furniture change teaching?

I first said ‘no thanks’ to the DfES and Design Council invitation to enter the Furniture of the Future design competition in 2002. Nor was I alone in feeling that education was not a good place to go for design-led companies like mine. Classroom furniture has hardly changed in 40 years – plastic stacking chairs are £10, tubular steel tables, £20. Hardly a promising market for design-led innovation.

But eventually I was persuaded to enter after looking at the huge changes that were taking place in education and teaching. The typical ‘chalk and talk’ layout of columns and rows of chairs and desks seemed incompatible with the changing needs of individual and group learning, the use of auditoria-like rooms with teachers using all the walls, and particularly the approach of embedded computing in every subject. Put on top of this, health and safety requirements for furniture that are taken for granted in any office, but are ignored in schools, and it was clear that the furniture was clearly getting in the way of effective teaching and learning.

Perhaps too pessimistically I thought that we had little chance of getting some really progressive design work to survive the whole process of design, development, production and eventually sale to the education market - the whole system seemed to be literally, stacked against it.

The money – we reckoned only £80m, tops, of the government’s annual £1bn budget was spent on furniture – just £2500 per school per year on average. We calculated that with parents spending £200 per year on apparel, we’d be better designing a backpack to replace the furniture – it could increase the potential market 100-fold. Leaving classrooms empty and innovating education by having no furniture was a creative business idea, but the feedback from the DfES and Design Council was, ‘Can we now have some furniture designs?’

So furniture they got. Not a four-leg chair or a four-leg table, but an Orbital Workstation.

A what? A desk and chair, attached, where the chair can be swivelled around the table to point in any direction, where the chair goes up and down like an office chair, where the whole thing can be moved like a trolley to where you want it to be – until you sit down, when it locks. It takes the bags off the floor, takes 90 chair legs out of each classroom, fits students of all sizes, and lets the teachers reconfigure a classroom in under two minutes – over and over again.

Did we believe we would win the competition and come up with a commercial product? Yes and no. We thought we could win on the design front because we were working with world famous designers Shin and Tomoko Azumi. But would our design not only win the competition, but be accepted by schools? No. The idea of improved educational outcomes linked to better design might have been high on the priority list for the DfES and Design Council staff running the competition, but we thought that schools and more specifically, teachers and students, wouldn’t understand the benefits of our furniture.

In some ways doing all the research and then winning the competition was only a small part of the Orbital journey. It took a few years of experience in our test schools to confirm that a little piece of intuitive design was indeed making life easier and better for the teachers and students. It even changed the vocabulary of classroom architecture, with the concept of the 360° classroom. Not only did our award winning design work, it has stirred up plenty of market interest, so much so that there are several imitations on the market, and not just in the UK. So the Orbital is already an international success, but how I wish there was a little more respect for our intellectual property!

Winning the DfES/Design Council award has not been a financial bonanza, but a salutary lesson in the difficulties of protecting and capitalising on investments in intellectual property. It has now taken five years, but the Orbital II, manufactured and sold under licence by ISIS Concepts, was recently launched at BETT and has also been on display at the Education Show in Birmingham.

It has been a long and interesting journey, but is the Orbital a good design and successful for its audience? Since our first prototypes were installed, I have been constantly amazed by what I have seen.

Many of our ideas were turned on their heads seeing Orbital’s use in schools. However, the common thread in all the trials and installations was that teachers and students loved the change the Orbital made to their experience of education. I may be a bit biased, but I think we really have succeeded in showing that innovative design, even of simple items like furniture, can have positive educational outcomes. Making a difference in education is the goal of many companies, and while this might not have been our original primary goal, I am very pleased and proud that this has been the outcome.

Charles Keen
www.keen.biz