JRuiter

Designer Joey Ruiter’s studio is a tall pole barn painted black,
nestled among trees in West Michigan. Sketches of designs ranging from
half-baked to fully realized clutter the walls, and to some, the random
materials strewn about could seem chaotic. But to Ruiter, they sit at
the heart of how he works best—a little chaos, followed by a lot of
refinement.

You’ll find designs like Ruiter’s all-black, slim-cut
snowmobile moped that just arrived back home after a jaunt at New York
Fashion Week as well as a wall of bulky tires and an all-black deer
trophy. His ability to stitch together unexpected elements to create
highly functional designs might seem like a bit like mad science. But
this curious, spontaneous approach has led him to reimagine conventional
office furniture designs, resulting in products like Canvas Office
Landscape.

“It’s like an approach of a mad
scientist—I can handle a lot of conflicting issues at once and make
sense of it by stripping it down and getting to the core of it.”

Herman Miller approached Ruiter about a new addition to Canvas
to get a different perspective. The request? A workstation that fit
within a compressed footprint, all without compromising people’s
experiences or reverting to a benching application. He sketched out a
few ideas right away that would become a very close match to what Canvas
Vista looks like today.

For the next year, Ruiter tweaked and tuned his design, trying to strip
the desking system down to the essentials. To him, the best designs seem
effortless, where you don’t see the complex engineering that brings
them to life. They should look simple, too. Ruiter didn’t want Vista to
have anything that felt like filler—add-ons without purpose.

One of Ruiter’s “aha” moments came from considering the view from the workstation—hence the name Vista.

Some of his first iterations had arches and doorways to help frame the
view of a person sitting at the desk. But Ruiter quickly realized that
those were unnecessary. He could specifically imply space and give
people privacy, intimacy, and real boundaries—and a sense of ownership
for their personal workspaces—without a literal opening.

So Ruiter created implied planes and boundaries throughout the
workstation, like the open-frame screens and the T-shaped light. These
open frames sit atop the power chase, which has screens that can be
closed for privacy or opened for conversation. The
multi-functional T-Light provides light and gives a visual cue for
boundary. With parts that have more than one purpose, freed-up space can
be better used.

The result is a cleverly efficient design that has everything
it needs and nothing that it doesn’t. How do you do more for people with
less space? Canvas Vista provides the right kind of space for people
while giving organizations a lot more to work with.

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Not every sketch is perfect, glamorous, or even legible... but this is the real work and thinking that lead to the production of the new Herman Miller's Canvas Vista system.