Word: designated
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...designers agree that the best way to cap cube chatter is to move it. "To do that," says James Ludwig, director of design for Steelcase, "you need to create spaces for people to go." Steelcase is testing a concept called the Cell Cell, a phone booth fitted with reception boosters. Chatty colleagues might gravitate to the Dyadic Slice, designed for two, or hold brainstorming sessions in the Digital Yurt, whose sensor-triggered lighting oscillates with increased activity...
...called hoteling. With 62% of office workers desiring flex time and 42% longing to telecommute, is the cubicle as we know it dead? "I don't think it should have ever been born, so I would love to say yes," says Alan Hedge, a Cornell professor who studies workplace design. "Technology already allows most of us to work from anywhere, but companies want to retain control." So enjoy your smaller, cooler company cubicle--just don't get too comfortable...
...Runway, Cutforth admits, "we were nervous that we could make people sewing into interesting television." Not only did they, but they did it without dumbing down the creative process. There's a scene in the first season in which eventual winner Jay McCarroll, stuck trying to draw up a design that is classic and tasteful while reflecting his flamboyant style, looks out the window and sees the burnished Art Deco crown of Manhattan's Chrysler Building, which he reinterprets as a dress. It's a better, more succinct illustration of creative inspiration than most novels and movies about artists manage...
...HGTV Design Star (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T.; debuts July 23), celebrity is the prize: as on The Next Food Network Star, the winner gets to host a show on the channel. (Runway's winner gets, among other perks, $100,000 to start a business.) Otherwise, the show is basically Project Living Room--10 aspiring home designers try to please a troika of judges--with a focus on collaboration. In the first episode, the competitors work in teams to appoint the extremely narrow town house they're staying in. "Design is not all about your personal tastes," says HGTV programming vice...
...course, TLC did not invent the idea of inspiration as a performance, any more than Runway, Top Chef et al. transformed design, cooking and so on into entertainment. Isaac Mizrahi, Emeril Lagasse and Martha Stewart turned their fields into reality TV long before reality TV did, making their personae inseparable from their work. Says Kara Janx, who finished fourth on last season's Runway: Celebrity "is part and parcel of being a designer today. When people know the person behind the brand, they become invested in it." That said, she adds, "I want to die as a good designer...