Middle Atlantic’s Forum Collaboration Suite | 2020

Designers: Matt Green, Kurt Rampton, David Bulfin, Chris Cureton, and Jereme Gilbert, Boltgroup, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA and David Albright, Mark Trebicki, Paul Dolynchuk, Dean Wheelan, Patrick Kittredge, Karen Smidt, Jared Berg, Andreas Pappas, Phillip Prestigomo, Jeffrey Provost, and Timothy Troast, Middle Atlantic-Legrand, West Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Manufacturer: Middle Atlantic-Legrand, West Hartford, Connecticut, USA

When BOLTGROUP started working with the Middle Atlantic product team on what would become the Forum Collaboration Suite, the future of office work was far from clear. It was the summer of 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the world, office workers were adjusting to working from home for the first time. Nobody knew when or how we would return to the office, but one thing was clear: office work would be fundamentally changed forever.

So how do you design collaborative office furniture for an uncertain future? The answer, it turns out, is to take an “agile” approach. Businesses and workers face several challenges, as well as some opportunities, in a post-pandemic office environment, including adapting to a “hybrid” work model.
Hybrid work—with some team members in the office and others working remotely—promises a lot of benefits: greater flexibility to workers and businesses, and even reduced carbon emissions and oil dependency as we take less trips to the office.

The challenges were also becoming clear: How do workers communicate and collaborate when half of their team is in the room, and the other half is remote? How do businesses outfit their office spaces for this future work style to maximize collaboration, productivity, and worker experience? With the future of the office environment unclear, Middle Atlantic and BOLTGROUP design teams set out to envision an office furniture solution for a problem we were still working to understand.

We knew we needed a process that would be flexible and responsive to fast-changing attitudes and criteria. We embraced a lean, iterative, “fail-forward” approach that would involve quickly generating and testing ideas with customers, refining the best ideas for in-market testing and more feedback, each time elevating the ideas and solutions that resonated most.

The solution that emerged is a suite of office collaboration furniture that is as flexible as the development process from which it came. The Forum Collaboration Suite is a modular “huddle space” that can be adapted and adjusted to meet the needs of today’s, and tomorrow’s, office. The suite is anchored by the innovative A/V tower, an all-in-one video conferencing hub with a sound-damping privacy panel that provides a premium communication experience for team members in-person and remote.

The huddle space can be built out with 3 table options to accommodate different size teams and spaces. The system can adjust between sitting and standing heights. And Forum can be accessorized with a wide variety of Middle Atlantic and Legrand equipment to create a customized and future-proof solution for any office configuration.