If anyone thinks that all the problems in search have been solved, well let me tell you a quick story.
I was reading yet another article about the depressing future of open plan offices: Even the Pandemic Can’t Kill the Open-Plan Office (disclaimer citylab is owned by my employer).
And part way down, there was a picture of an open plan office spaced out more, at the Oakland offices of Gensler, an architectural and design firm. What was interesting to me was not the spacing, but chairs pictured.
I am kind of a chair junkie. I owned five or six different kind of Herman Miller chairs I picked up on ebay over the years. Mirra is actually my favorite, and I just can't stand the Envoy though it could be I don't have it adjusted right. Now that all my co-workers are working from home, I've recommended the chairs to them, but like cheap web-cams, they're a little hard to come by at the moment. So I'm always on the lookout for other interesting options.
These chairs in the Gensler office, looked interesting. But what were they?
Several searches on common office supply sites (and the borg of e-commerce, amazon) were useless. They kept circling back to cheap hundred dollar chairs I wouldn't be caught dead in. There's no good way to search for "high end office chair where the arm rests attach to the seat back". I started looking for the most expensive chair I could find, and then search the entire inventory of that online catalog for something that matched. I searched for mesh chairs, task chairs, white chairs, executive chairs, all sorts of combinations of the above and others.
Useless. Hours wasted.
Finally, in frustration I searched for anything that mentioned chairs in regards to that office:
"Gensler Oakland chair"And I got back a breadcrumb:
located in Oakland, California. Gensler's Oakland office is characterized by. ... Haworth Collection by Forest Side Chair · Forest Side ChairNow what I did not realize was that officesnapshots.com where this link came back, had the picture of the chair I was looking at, and was annotated with its name. Instead I focused on the brand mentioned in the quoted text, hoping that the humans at that office were as predictable as most humans were, and if a site carried the Haworth collection, then it might also carry the other chair.
That landed me on modernplanet.com. Under office::task chairs, I started getting pretty close. There were a bunch of chairs from Knoll called regeneration that had what looked like the right back, but the arm rests were wrong. Then near the end of page two (who ever goes past page one on search results?), there it was "Knoll Generation Chair". At a modest price of $635, though when you add all the bells and whistles, its more like $930.
They even have a few on ebay, though the selection of colors is a little limited, and the most interesting one is local pickup in Dallas. Now who do I know that I could bug in Dallas ...
So once again, it comes as no surprise (at least to me) that the internet is terrible at helping you discover things that you didn't know were there. Discovery is a second class citizen. Even tools we had, we've lost. My college library back in the day was modernizing to add the ability to search for books on the mainframe (ya, I'm that old), and one of the features it had was the ability to see what books were next to the one you looked up on the bookshelf. I've never seen that feature since. Part of the wonder of the human brain is its ability to make connections between things, and through sharing those connections, create discovery. We have not even scratched the surface of how technology could support and strengthen that process.
