Stacking chairs have long been a space-saving staple of offices, homes and schools, but getting a complex shape like a desk to stack up is a challenge — one these designers decided to take on for a very specific and practical application.

Studio Nos redesigned the traditional children’s school desk to make it affordable, durable, lightweight and able to be put away when not in use. The result of their efforts is a brightly colorful and interconnected chair-and-desk system with a number of nifty features.

The conical chairs stack for storage while a backrest allows students to hang their bags and backpacks. A slot underneath, meanwhile, provides a place to store books and other school supplies.

The top addition can be taken off, too, not just to store but also to make space and change up seating configurations. All in all, the seat-and-top set gets the job done and looks good while doing it, then comes apart as needed.

Fun workspace features like slides and outlandishly creative office design schemes get a lot of attention, but ultimately, the individual workspaces where employees carry out most of their daily tasks are more germane to both happiness and productivity. Should they be private, or prioritize openness and collaboration? Should they be serious, or a little quirky and fun? These 12 modern workspaces show how various companies and designers have answered those questions, and most of the time, the solutions are somewhere in between – with a heavy emphasis on adaptability and choice.

Treehouse 2 by Dymitr Malcew

Contained within your own little acoustically insulated pod, you could stretch out and get comfortable, have a phone conversation, huddle together with another employee, wheel yourself into a private corner of the office or come together with multiple other units to form a little ‘village.’ The ‘Treehouse’ and ‘Treehouse 2’ structures by architect Dymitr Malcew are somewhere in between architecture and furniture, finding middle ground between fully enclosed offices and the kind of open-plan spaces that workers tend to find distracting and uncomfortable.

Snaking Interactive Desk by Teamlab for Pixiv

A single desk snakes around a vividly colored office space for a full 820 feet, providing all sorts of nooks and crannies for workers to choose from. Designed by Teamlab for Pixiv, a Japanese online community for artists, the wooden table is a single continuous loop with a ‘bridge’ you walk under to get inside. Cutouts in the surface make way for cables and chargers as well as a few semi-enclosed working areas.

Zones by Pearsonlloyd

From intensive individual work sessions to collaborations to meetings to phone calls, an office should have a variety of ‘zones’ offering comfortable spaces for various functions. The ‘Zones’ collection by London-based designers PearsonLloyd, created for Teknion, takes all of these needs into account.

“Zones includes a variety of furniture components that can be combined with other to create an all-inclusive office furniture solution,” say the designers. “The collection is shaped around the idea of Informal Productivity – an alternative to the traditional office, designed to give users choice and to create work environments that encourage collaborative and private settings… the emotional, humanistic aspect is fundamental to Zones as the collection supports modern office tasks in a manner that recognizes the human craving for familiarity, warmth, comfort and empowerment.”

Suspended Workspace by Studio Frank Havermans

It may look like a carnival ride, but this hovering contraption by Studio Frank Havermans is actually a desk designed for the head office at Akzonobel, a paint and coating company in Amsterdam. The designers took the color scheme from the new McLaren F1 car MCL33. It’s unclear whether the desk, which was created as part of an exhibition called ‘Common Ground,’ will be in regular use by people in the office, but it’s probably a lot more fun than the average workspace in the building.

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The typical desk design has remained the same for centuries, but we need these surfaces to do more – like incorporate our gadgets, offer privacy in loud offices, fit into our homes, fold up to take on the go or offer proper space for our cat overlords. Maybe even all of these things at once.  These designs are more than just a flat slab on legs, adapting to 21st century standards in all sorts of different ways.

Turia Table by Maxime Mellot Incorporates Nature

“Can we admire nature and put it in a cage?” says Maxime Mellot of his own design, this curious desk inspired by a park in the city of Valencia, Spain. “Turia participates in the debate, and forces the user to divert his attention, from his own person to live animals, requiring care and benevolence. In a society focused on performance and permanent connection to the internet, pure moments of privacy become rare and precious. But how can furniture invite us to take a break, drink a tea or have a snack and help us to enjoy this specific disconnected moment? My project tends to merge the universe of nature and relaxation, by combining iconic items such as bird cage and fish tank in an interactive way.”

Koloro-Desk by Torafu Architects

The interior of the Koloro-desk by Torafu Architects is like a cheerful miniature house with its very own operable windows, so you can lean inside to read, work, sketch or nap and feel a sense of disconnection from the world just outside its little walls. The two flip-out windows on either side offer shelves for drinks and other objects, and there’s even a skylight.

Oxymoron Desk by Anna Lotova

Shove stationery, pens and other item between the two little cushions under the surface of Anna Lotova’s Oxymoron Desk. The name comes from the unlikely pairing of materials. The cushion sandwich even lets you slide a piece of plywood inside to create a side table.

“We have to change our behavior, plan and think of work with a different mindset: no matter where an office is situated, it has to have a space it can call its own, identifiable, alterable, on a human scale, with its own history and objects, an enjoyable environment,” says Lotova.

CATable by Hao Ruan

Do you have a persistent feline companion who gets a little jealous of your computer or books when you’re working? This clever table by Hao Ruan of LYCS Architecture doubles as cat furniture, with the underside full of comfy curving hollows and tunnels for your cat friend to hide in.

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Two hundred species of edible greens occupy a quarter of this 215,000-square-foot office in Tokyo, Japan, sharing space with thousands of workers who in turn consume harvested fruits, vegetables and rice right in the building’s cafeteria, a direct farm-to-table connection.

Plants are expertly interspersed with other functions throughout the building, sustained via soil-based and hydroponic systems, including 1,000 square feet of rice paddies and extensive broccoli fields.

Kono Designs elaborates on the ways different food-bearing plants occupy any extra (and sometimes hidden) spaces throughout the structure: “Tomato vines are suspended above conference tables, lemon and passion fruit trees are used as partitions for meeting spaces, salad leaves are grown inside seminar rooms and bean sprouts are grown under benches.”

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Ready or not, it’s time to stand up when this kinetic desk starts to rise on its own, ensuring that you don’t spend too much time in an unhealthy seated position as you work. Studies have shown that parking ourselves in chairs for eight hours or more per day can lead to organ damage, foggy brain, a strained neck, muscle degeneration and other negative effects. Experts recommend alternating between sitting and standing – and now there’s a high-tech desk that will help you do just that.

The Stir Kinetic Desk gently raises and lowers itself at pre-set intervals, to custom heights of your choice. A built-in touch screen on the desk surface enables you to check your daily stats, telling you how long you’ve spent in each position and when your next adjustment should be.

You just double-tap the home screen to move the desk to its next position when desired, using a slider to create your desk height presets. A function called ‘Whisperbreath’ creates a gentle one-inch rise and fall of the desk surface to signal you that it’s time to stand up so you don’t have to stop what you’re doing.

The creator calls it a “non-wearable wearable,” i.e. a fitness-tracking gadget that works in a similar way to smart watches and Fitbits. You can also synch other fitness tech to track how many calories you burn while standing. The cost of “the world’s most advanced desk” clocks in at $2,990.