Fun with Furniture

Yesterday we attended a Furniture Fair, featuring a number of Drexel-approved vendors. While we still aren't sure exactly how much new furniture we'll be able to afford as part of the move, it was a nice way to get started thinking about the possibilities in slightly more concrete terms. I hadn't realized the variety of options now available in the office furniture market - but luckily we now have something on the order of fifty catalogs to keep ourselves thinking about what we'd like.

While most of the offerings were reasonably straightforward, we did come across a magnificent publication from a company called Coalesse (Artsy layouts! Floating pullquotes in edgy fonts! Different kinds of paper in one catalog!). They described themselves thusly:

With products that fit as naturally in the office as the living room, Coalesse focuses on the increasingly growing similarities between work and life.

Gone are the harsh lines and glaring surfaces that have long characterized the workplace. Coalesse has replaced them with softened, contoured shapes that represent the new sensibilities of the modern way we work.

To that end, we decided we had no choice but to invest in this $12,000 chair for our new reading room:


I'm sure our researchers would appreciate it.

But in all seriousness, we did get the opportunity to give the treadmill workstation a try - and we absolutely loved it.


It would make cataloging and working with our accessions data a breeze - and we'd keep fit too! If only we could find a grant to pay for it...

Plots and Plans

Details about the move tend to hover around the edges of our day-to-day work; we try to fit in planning meetings where and when we can. Yesterday's edition was all about furniture - whose budget will it come out of? Are we getting new furniture at all? Will our existing furniture fit in the new offices? What are we forgetting? What happened to things that went into storage after the last move? Of course, we had not gotten very far in making our furniture lists before we had to move on our next engagement - training on our new overhead camera system (PDF warning) and the CaptureOne software that powers it.

We obviously have a lot to learn about it, but we are starting to get to grips with it just in time - requests came in for a number of oversized items to be digitized, and happily we could meet those needs in-house (although I'm sure we will be tweaking things for some time to come). We also experimented with some of our smaller photographs to see just how much detail we could get out of them - (and also because we needed to digitize them quickly - it was serendipitous timing) this one of Constantine Hering from the Hahnemann collection was one of our first guinea pigs, with the finishing touches only added this morning.