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.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Bye Bye Boring Workspace 12 Office Arrangements That Feel Fresh Fun

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.

Unless you happen to work at Google, your conventional office space is going to seem awfully boring compared to the slides, disappearing desks, submarine-inspired meeting pods, turfed running tracks and other unusual design choices at these 13 highly creative workplaces.

Monolithic Chair-Free Office

There are no chairs to be found in this faceted office space full of sloping geometric surfaces – workers have to either stand, perch on benches or lounge. Not that they’re complaining. Developed by design studio RAAAF and visual artist Barbara Visser, the workplace design is entitled ‘The End of Sitting.’ “The installation’s various affordances solicit visitors to explore different standing positions in an experimental work landscape.”

Wave-Like ‘Superdesk’

One single desk surface weaves and undulates through the office for a digital creative industry like a ribbon, rising up in spots to create arched entrances to tucked-away work areas. The glossy, gleaming ‘Superdesk’ by Clive Wilkinson Architects seats all 125 employees of The Barbarian Group and transforms what would normally be considered furniture into architecture complete with roofs. The undersides of the desk offer storage, and occasionally reach heights that are tall enough to create private little alcoves.

Shipping Container Offices

Clive Wilkinson and Associates also created an incredible shipping container-based work environment for Pallotta Teamworks in a new and entirely empty 47,000-square-foot warehouse in Los Angeles. The firm had to do the project on half the usual budget for such a space, making it difficult to even fully air-condition it, so they came up with a creative solution: seven tented villages or ‘breathing islands’ that are climate-controlled while the rest of the space is not.

Disappearing Desks

There’s no danger of overworking yourself at Amsterdam design studio Hedergroen: once office hours are up, staff desks simply disappear. Computers, paperwork and other desktop items remain in place as the desks raise up to the ceiling on steel cables. When morning comes, they drop down again, resting on rolling cabinets for stability.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Odd Offices 13 Outside The Box Workspace Designs

Typical office furniture is gray, drab, and uncomfortable. Seeing row after row of cubicles, all paired with the same black office chair and occupied by the same bored looking colleague sitting at the same modern desk design, day after day, can really get to you. From desks to chairs, these unusually creative office furnitures could help you perk up your office – or at least give you something interesting to look at while you’re pretending that you’re not reading WebUrbanist at work. Also check out our complete collection of 90 Creative Urban Furniture Designs.

At first glance, the Trey Chair seems to be an ordinary office chair. But when you look closer, you notice that it’s two distinct pieces that can come apart and be used separately. The seat becomes a low rocker, perfect for playing video games or doing homework, while the wheeled base becomes a tiny table or comfy ottoman. This has to be one of the best multi-functional chairs we’ve seen. You can go from working at a desk to working low to the ground with a laptop table in no time flat.

How many times have you needed to read up on a subject for work or school, but just couldn’t find a quiet place to do it? The Bookinist, from German designer Nils Holger Moormann, solves that problem in a very neat way. The Bookinist is basically a portable chair that just happens to have a ton of book storage space built in. It can hold about 80 paperback books, plus it has a hidden compartment for storing reading essentials – which, according to the picture, apparently include a magnifying glass and some paint stirring sticks. The attached reading lamp makes it easy to goof off and read comics study even in low light. This awesomely unique chair would be at home in nearly any room.

Although the Flagship Vision One chair could conceivably be used for work, it is obviously meant to be the greatest gaming chair ever. Made with a genuine Porsche seat and featuring ample surfaces for all of your gear, the V1 is the ultimate in working/gaming comfort. And if your job just happens to be playing video games, even better.

Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic has done extensive research on the effects of low-speed walking while working. In his estimation, workers can lose 57 pounds in a year if they do nothing else but walk at 1-2 miles per hour while working on their computer. While it would obviously take a little time to get used to walking and typing, this seems like a sensible and simple way to keep in shape. The treadmill workstation from Steelcase comes in a stationary design or an adjustable one that lets you go from walking to sitting with just a few adjustments. Or, if you’re adventurous and handy with a saw, try making your own.

If you’ve ever worked in an office, you know how it can grind down your soul. The constant noise, the lack of personal space, and the frequent interruptions found in most offices are enough to make some of us hide in a bathroom stall just to get a little time away. If you can convince your boss to let you get this excellent piece of furniture, your privacy (and perhaps your dignity) will be restored. The House on the Table, from design studio Design Mong, is quite literally a house on a table. It’s like a cave that fits on top of your desk and gives you your own little fort inside your office. Imagine how fun it would be to hold a meeting in this tiny playhouse office.

If you happen to have large piles of cash just waiting to be spent, the DC6 Cowling Desk from MotoArt would be an outstanding addition to your office. In its former life it housed an aircraft engine. Now it can look fashionable and shiny, holding your computer as you toil away all day.

It looks sort of like a weird steampunk dentist chair, but the Nethrone is in fact an adjustable work station that allows users to adjust the tilt of the chair and monitor. The end result is sort of like a customizable cradle that provides a relaxing work environment…if you can keep yourself from falling asleep in it, that is.

While it most likely won’t fit into your office, the Conference Bike is a fun way to take the office outside. Pile your Party-Planning Committee members on and take a ride around the park while the debate over the color of the napkins rages on. The Conference Bike is a trike on which seven people sit and pedal while one steers. We can imagine that in some offices, choosing one person to steer would require a whole new committee.

Finally, another impressive offering from the mind of Nils Holger Moormann: the Lese + Lebe (or Read + Live). There are almost too many cool things about this piece of furniture to list them all. The back is a bookcase, while the front features a couch, fold-down tables, pull-out footrests, storage drawers, and even some cute lamps. The tables look to be just about the right size for perching your laptop on. The whole thing is on wheels, making it a breeze to move from one room to another when your family or coworkers in one room get to be a bit too much.

Unusual Furniture 1: Brilliant Bedroom Furniture

Unusual Furniture 2: Unusual and Geeky Living Room Furniture