The road to London and new product launches / John Miller

29.04.13

We are putting the finishing touches to some new and new-look products which we’ll be launching at Clerkenwell Design Week.  MARK are in the Farmiloe Building venue, on the first floor.

This year’s launches are designed in-house by myself and co-director Anna Hart.  It was an aim of ours to carve out some design-time for ourselves amidst the hectic business of running the company.  We have worked with – and will continue to work with – some great designers, but inevitably have built up a list of products we wanted to work on ourselves.

We’ve specified a lot of RED for the stand, so visitors might want to pack their shades!

Mycroft

First of these is Mycroft, a seating range that is aimed at semi-formal meetings:  for example, conversations and ad-hoc meetings at work that don’t require a meeting room; private discussions in open-plan areas like receptions, dining areas and concourses.

We experimented with full-size models to see exactly what extent of ‘wing’ you need on a wingback chair to give you actual acoustic privacy, and perceived privacy without feeling you are in a coffin.  It turns out that the back of the chair just coming into the peripheral vision was about right.

You can lean into the chair to speak privately into a phone, and you experience a ‘flattening’ of the noise behind you to enable you to concentrate on conversation.  The thinking is carried into the smaller/lower chairs and sofas.  Privacy is reduced, but there is still a sense of enclosure, of the chair wrapping you.  Also the dimensions of the chair are important – it’s based on a cone which means you can sit centred, or ‘conversationally’ to one side.