Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Alka Seltzer, 1966. Graphite and lithographic rubbing crayon pochoir, with scraping, on cream wove paper, fixed. 76.2 x 55.9 cm (30 x 22 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Art Institute of Chicago, Margaret Fisher Endowment.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Artist’s Studio No. 1 (Look Mickey), 1973. Oil, Magna, sand with aluminum powder and Magna medium on canvas. 243.8 x 325.1 cm (96 x 128 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton and the T.B. Walker Foundation, 1981.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Ball of Twine, 1963. Magna on canvas. 172.7 x 91.4 cm (40 x 36 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Christie’s.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Brushstroke with Spatter, 1966. Oil and Magna on canvas. 121.9 x 152.4 cm (68 x 80 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Art Institute of Chicago, Barbara Neff Smith and Solomon Byron Smith Purchase Fund.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Haystack, 1969. Oil on canvas. 45.7 x 61 cm (18 x 24 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. The Ruben Family.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Haystacks, 1969. Oil and Magna on canvas. 40.6 x 61 cm (16 x 24 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. The Ruben Family.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Hot Dog with Mustard, 1963. Oil on canvas. 45.7 x 121.9 cm (18 x 48 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Aaron I. Fleischman.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Keds, 1961. Oil on canvas. 123.2 x 88.3 cm (48.5 x 34.75 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. The Robert B. Mayer Family Collection, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Landscape in Fog, 1996. Oil and Magna on canvas. 180.3 x 207.6 cm (71 x 81.75 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Private Collection.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Laocoön, 1988. Oil and Magna on canvas. 304.8 x 259.1 cm (120 x 102 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Private Collection.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Look Mickey, 1961. Oil on canvas. 121.9 x 175.3 cm (48 x 69 in). © National Gallery of Art. The National Gallery of Art. Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein, Gift of the artist, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Masterpiece, 1962. Oil on canvas. 137.2 x 137.2 cm (54 x 54 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Agnes Gund Collection, New York.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Nude with Street Scene, 1995. Oil on Magna on canvas. 121.9 x 171.5 cm (48 x 67 1/2 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Collection Simonyi.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Oh, Jeff…I Love You, Too…But…, 1964. Oil and Magna on canvas. 121.9 x 121.9 cm (48 x 48 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Collection Simonyi.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Sunrise, 1965. Oil and Magna on canvas. 91.4 x 172.7 cm (36 x 68 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Private Collection.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). The Ring (Engagement), 1962. Oil on canvas. 121.9 x 177.8 cm (48 x 70 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Stefan T. Edlis Collection.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Untitled, 1959. Oil on canvas. 86.5 x 71.3 cm (34.0625 x 28.0625 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Private Collection..

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Wall Explosion II, 1965. Porcelain enamel on steel 170.2 x 188 cm x 10.2 cm (67 x 74 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Tate: Purchased 1980. Photo ©Tate, 2011.

Roy Lichtenstein, American (1923-1997). Whaam!, 1963. Magna and oil on canvas. 172.7 x 406.4 cm (68 x 160 in). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Tate: Purchased 1966. Photo ©Tate, 2011.

Your customers are not only becoming increasingly social, their digital lifestyle is fueled by mobile devices. Whether it’s a smart phone or a tablet, they are masters of the small screen experience and accomplished in the art of communicating with both their thumbs and their voice. The most riveting facet of the mobile revolution is not only what we’re witnessing, it’s what we’re missing in these important times of transformation.

These connected customers or Generation C as I refer to them are critical to your organization beyond their role of consumer. They are increasingly taking over the inside of your company as your everyday workforce. So in many ways, we are the very people we’re trying to reach. And, to do so takes standardization, transformation, and empowerment. This is the dawn of the mobile enterprise and as a result, digital strategists must think beyond the idea of a social business. Now’s the time to lay the foundation for an adaptive enterprise where mobile becomes one of the pivotal screens for employee and customer engagement, communication and collaboration. Without leadership and standardization however, employees will use their mobile devices as part of their work, but do so without regard or knowledge of best practices on what to do and what not to do and how it aligns with corporate policies and security.

Chris Silva, my colleague at Altimeter Group, just released a new report, “Power to the People: Identify and Empower Your Mobile Workforce A Three-Phase Strategy to Serve Mobile Workgroups.” It was written with the intention of helping businesses better understand the state of the mobilized workforce and how to increase productivity while empowering the connected employee.

As Silva noted in his post announcing the report, “My collaborator and editor Jeremiah Owyang and I began with a hypothesis that, as the age of mobile = email has come to a close, are mobile employees being served with the proper applications to make them be more productive? Our guess was that they weren’t, and largely, rollouts are just getting started but there are already some lessons to be learned. The most important is that different roles have different needs from mobility, and determining who is using mobile today, and what their needs are from mobile is the first step to a defensible mobility plan.”

As always, a successful mobile rollout examines employee and customer expectations, business goals, and long-term trends to develop a strategy that looks beyond Blackberries, iPhones and iPads and Droids. One of Silva’s observations hits the new mobile opportunity squarely between the eyes, “Within one large law firm that we spoke with, in the course of one year, the company went from 100% BlackBerry devices for mobile users to just 5% — the other 95% were all iPhones. As mobile application ecosystems continue to flourish, supporting mobile users is no longer about email.”

In his report, Silva lays out a three step process to choose the right tools and ultimately develop the construct of a mobile and adaptive enterprise…

1. Conduct a mobility audit

2. Examine Roles

3. Partner Choice

His research encourages those leading technology strategies to start with understanding the constituencies inside the organization. As executives, technical workers, and contractors have varying needs for mobile productivity, they do share the need to stay connected and productive wherever whenever.

Silva’s research identified three common internal roles around mobile engagement…

1. Information Worker: Need = consume

2. Field/Sales Worker: Need = collaborate

3. Executive/Technical Worker: Need = compute

Consume: Users inside of organizations are looking to access corporate information on the go. These information consumers are seeking information that is accessible and digestible on their device of choice.

Collaborate: Workers may be creating information in the field, such as notes, drawings, recordings, and photos, and need a path to access and store information on corporate data stores. Current tools in place, such as Microsoft SharePoint, rank poorly among these users and IT departments due to a lack of support for popular mobile platforms.

Compute: Heavy travelers and temporary workers (like contractors) are looking to tablet devices to be the only piece of tech they carry day-to-day. An emerging class of solutions aims to give these users access to the enterprise applications, the corporate desktop, or both from the tablet or even smartphone the user is toting.

Participating organizations were then asked to rank their mobile challenges. Collaboration associated with remote/field professionals ranked at the top of the list with 61% followed by those who need access to complex computing tasks at 27%.

To help businesses grasp the state of mobile chaos within the organization, Silva leaves decision makers with three actionable steps to assess, learn, and design an informed and scalable mobile enterprise…

1. Conduct an audit for level-set: Before embarking on user identification and role analysis, the initial and most critical step is to perform a level-set. The question to answer is what are the devices and who is using them?

2. Understand user needs by conducting detailed stakeholder interviews and human factors analysis: The analysis completed in step 1 will highlight favorite tools, but as Silva cautions, they may not be the ideal choices for the long term.

3. Choose the right solution by creating a weighted partner model: Inputs form the previous two steps will help identify the platforms that demand support, as well as the groups most in need of mobility.

With all of the talk about social media and the need to create an infrastructure to support a social enterprise, we cannot overlook the importance of mobilizing the workforce. Doing so enables employees to more effectively collaborate with team members within to improve collaboration with customers externally.

The 2012 Olympics in London are being touted by some as the world’s “first social Games.” While some question just how social they’ll actually be, there’s no doubt that networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will play an unprecedented role in how information is disseminated from London, and how the global sports conversation is driven during July and August.

Why the big shift? It’s simple: Four years is an eternity in Internet time and since the last Summer Olympics in 2008, social media has exploded.

Web use in general has grown rapidly, too. In 2008, there were about 1.5 billion Internet users globally, according to the International Telecommunications Union, making up about 23% of the world’s total population. By this summer’s games, that number will have swelled to about 2.3 billion users making up about a third of the world’s total population.

Summer Olympics feature some of the most popular international sports — including soccer, basketball, swimming, and track and field — so that’s sure to fuel the global buzz as well. For more context on just how and why social media will reshape this year’s Olympics in relation to 2008, we thought it’d be interesting to take a quick look at a few of the world’s most popular networks and how they compare then and now.

Facebook

2008: A tweet in August of 2008 from then-Facebook executive and eventual Path co-founder Dave Morin gleefully celebrated Facebook breaking the 100 million-user threshold. 2008 was also marked by reports around the web of Facebook — gasp! — passing MySpace in popularity. The social network debuted its now omnipresent chat feature that year as well.

Today: Facebook claims more than 900 million users, is fast becoming a portal to the web at large for many and is a publicly traded company. Its founder Mark Zuckerberg is a global celebrity.

Twitter

2008: 2008 saw explosive growth for Twitter, and it still finished the year with about 6 million registered users who sent about 300,000 tweets per day. The social network and its users were still very much finding their way, as evidenced by this official blog post explaining @replies. In 2009, Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kevin Love would tweet that the team’s coach had been let go, breaking the story and causing some in the sports world to speculate that maybe, just maybe, the service could change how news was delivered and consumed.

Today: Twitter currently claims more than 500 million users who collectively send some 400 million tweets each and every day. Sports news regularly breaks on the network, it’s become a prime marketing channel for athletes and much of the London 2012 conversation among media and fans is sure to take place there.

YouTube

2008: By fall of 2008, YouTube users were uploading 10 hours of video to the site per minute. The site had emerged as the go-to destination for web video and had been acquired by Google two years prior. It also launched its mobile site, pre-roll ads and 720p HD option in 2008. But that success was nothing compared to what the site would look like four years later.

Today: Iconic Olympic moments are sure to go viral and become immortalized on YouTube seemingly as they happen this summer, and it’s easy to see why. The company says it receives over 800 million unique visits per month. Those visitors watch more than 3 billion hours of video per month and upload 72 hours of new video content per minute. Five hundred years’ worth of YouTube video are watched on Facebook every day and more than 700 YouTube videos get shared on Twitter each minute.

What It All Means

Just looking at the the three most ubiquitous social networks reveals a sporting scene and world at large that have been transformed by social media since the last Summer Olympics. And that doesn’t take into account services like Pinterest, Foursquare and Google+ — none of which even existed in 2008. This summer, expect news to break, social sharing records to fall and moments to live on as never possible before thanks to social media. And to think — this will all pale in comparison to what 2016 has in store.

How will you use social media during the 2012 Olympics? Share with us in the comments.

Thumbnail image via iStockphoto, cmannphoto

As competition in the fast-growing mobile web space continues to heat up, Amazon is working on a device to grab a slice of the pie currently dominated by the iPhone and Android smartphones, according to a Bloomberg report.

Interestingly, the hardware, cloud computing and e-commerce juggernaut is said to be working with Foxconn — which has come under intense scrutiny in the past year for working conditions in the Asian factories where it manufactures Apple gadgets — to create the Amazon iPhone competitor.

Bloomberg‘s report is based on “two people with knowledge of the matter.”

Amazon is also reportedly seeking to acquire a wide range of smartphone-related patents to guard against infringement accusations. That’s likely motivated in large part by Apple’s recent success in getting a U.S. District Court judge to grant a preliminary injunction blocking sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus — currently the only smartphone capable of running the Android operating system’s most recent version.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet has emerged as a very popular lower cost alternative to the iPad among consumers, so an Amazon smartphone does have some precedent for potential mobile success. A decent Amazon smartphone would also help it continue to reap profits through selling digital media including books, movies and music.

The future of the web is widely accepted to revolve around mobile access — and competition among tech companies is becoming increasingly fierce as hardware and software manufacturers jockey for position and profits in the next generation of consumers’ online lives. Last month, for example, Microsoft and Google announced tablet offerings meant to take on the iPad as smaller, more portable alternatives. In response, Apple is now said to be planning an “iPad mini” for release in time for this year’s holiday season.

Do you think Amazon would be wise to get into the smartphone market — or is that waste of time and resources for Jeff Bezos and company? Share your opinion in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, tumpikuja

Cara Friedman is the president of Likeable Community College, a social media training program for community managers and other social media professionals.

To be successful in social media and community management you need to keep track of the constant changes to that ecosystem. That’s because everything you know about Facebook, Twitter, and other social spaces today will somehow be different in six months. Layouts will be altered, features will be added or removed, and new social networks may pop up.

So how should you keep track of all these moving parts? Here are six tips for staying on top of social media.

1. Blogs

There are hundreds of blogs focused on social media. Keep it simple by signing up to RSS feeds and spend twenty minutes every morning catching up on your social media news. Stick to blogs that are updated daily and focus on providing content in social media and technology.

Consider adding these blogs to your RSS feed to get started: SocialTimes, Social Media Examiner, TechCrunch, and SocialMediaToday.

2. Webinars

Webinars are often offered by agencies and make for good social media resources. You can find webinars by searching on Twitter or registering on directories that list the week’s webinars. You can also attend paid webinars that go beyond the basics. In either case, you can find a good starter list at webinarlistings.com.

3. Trending Topics

Yes, reading your blogs in the morning is effective but information travels fast so pay attention to what’s trending on Twitter, too. First, make sure that you check your Twitter trend settings. Certain settings will spit out tailored trends, which you should probably avoid.

Also, if you don’t understand why a certain word or phrase is trending you can check out whatthetrend.com for explanations.

4. Newsletters

Not all newsletters are spam. Some are actually worth signing up for. If you’re OK with getting a daily newsletter, check out SmartBrief. If you prefer a weekly roundup then take a look at SocialFresh. These newsletters curate the best social media content from the web and create original highly informative articles as well.

5. Meetups and Tweetups

Whether in person at a meetup or virtually at a tweetup, chatting with like-minded individuals will keep you on your toes, help you predict what’s coming next, and teach you new things about how others are behaving in social media. To find a group of social media fanatics near you check out Meetup.com.

6. Training and Certification

If you are serious about educating yourself in the social space you may consider signing up for a training program or certification course. Whether you are looking for a six-week crash course or an ongoing education program, resources are available. To start, you can check out WOMM-COM and HootSuiteU.

In the battle for your mobile wallet one company has been noticeably silent: Apple.

Google has its own mobile payment service: Google Wallet, and Microsoft even announced in June that it would be adding a digital wallet service with NFC capabilities to Windows Phone 8 that would store credit card and mobile payment information.

So, where is the world’s favorite fruit company?

In its announcement of iOS6 mobile payments were left off the agenda. The company unveiled Passbook, a service for keeping track of tickets and coupons, but not credit cards.

According to the Wall Street Journal, some Apple engineers fought for mobile payment functionality. However, the decision –- a very intentional one -– to leave mobile payments out of iOS 6 was made anyway.

The reason?

“Apple is always a comfortable number two,” said Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster to the Wall Street Journal. “They let their competitors do their market research for them.”

Mobile payments are expected to hit $600 billion worldwide by 2016; however, most mainstream consumers are still not adopting them. NFC, the technology that allows you to tap your phone on a surface in order to pay, also isn’t expected to be available in most merchants for another few years.

According to the WSJ, Apple doesn’t want to be the one facilitating mobile credit cards payments when the service isn’t ready, for fear that customers will blame Apple for merchant’s failures during the process. Under that logic, we may not see Apple deploy NFC or mobile payments in the iPhone for some time, and especially not in the upcoming iPhone 5.

What do you think about NFC? Would you like the ability to make payments by taping your iPhone at a point of sale or is the technology still a little too new for your comfort? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

The Spark of Genius Series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Each post highlights a unique feature of a startup. If you’d like your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Signature

Quick Pitch: iPhone app connects customers with sales associates 24/7.

Genius Idea: Leveraging mobile to provide an unprecedented level of customer service.

Though online shopping has undergone multiple transformations over the past two decades, the same can not be said for brick-and-mortar retail. Shoppers are still brought in using approximately the same marketing tactics (think direct mail catalogs, window displays, seasonal sales). Product is still refreshed at the same rates and customers still line up and check out, with few exceptions, at cash registers.

Signature, a mobile app company that bills itself as the “ultimate personal shopping assistant,” is looking to reengineer the way consumers shop in stores — namely, the stores of upscale clothing retailers. The San Francisco-based startup has partnered with Neiman Marcus to develop a custom iPhone app to better facilitate communications between stores and customers.

The app, called NM Service, is currently being piloted at four Neiman Marcus locations: San Francisco, Calif.; Palo Alto, Calif.; Austin, Texas; and Neiman Marcus’s flagship store in Dallas, Texas.

It has two interfaces: one for shoppers and one for sales associates. Shoppers are able to able to browse event schedules, new arrivals and promotions. As they browse, they can favorite products and even arrange for them to be placed in a dressing room ahead of arrival, Signature CEO David Hegarty tells Mashable. They can also make appointments and leave messages for associates, and see which ones are on the floor. A built-in QR code reader lets them scan signage for trend and product information displayed in-store.

Sales associates’ version of the app has tools designed to help them provide better service. They can view a shoppers’ online and in-store purchase history, helping them better understand their preferences and suggest items that might compliment previous purchases. They can also see which products a customer has favorited. They will be notified when a preferred customer arrives in-store, accompanied by a Facebook photograph.

All sales associates have been provided with iPhones and app training, Ginger Reeder, VP of corporate communications at Neiman Marcus, tells Mashable. Customers can learn about the app by picking up booklet instructions in kiosks around the store, and by speaking to their regular sales associates.

Hegarty says that future iterations of the app will be more personalized. Users will receive notifications about new merchandise based on their previous purchase history, and have the option to list not just favorite products but also favorite designers.

Beyond the custom app he and his team have developed for Neiman Marcus, Signature also has a general platform app which works with two Seven for all Mankind locations: one at Fashion Island in Newport Beach, Calif., and another in the Flatiron district of New York City. A few more retail partners will be onboarded later this year, and an Android version of the app should also arrive in time for the holidays, he says.

Signature currently has eight employees and has raised $1.1 million in angel funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Triangle Peak Partners, Amicus Capital, Don Hutchison and Dave Pell.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

In the U.S., why isn’t the percentage of government seats held by women higher?

Canada’s National Post has created an excellent infographic illustrating the data in Save the Children’s State of the World’s Mothers report. Co.Exist’s Ariel Schwartz dug into the report and visualization this morning.

The data highlights the fact that the U.S. lags behind many other nations when it comes to the percentage of government seats held by women – an issue that has been part of the broader, voracious debate reignited in recent weeks by Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” essay in The Atlantic. In the U.S., only 17% of government seats are held by women. Compare that to Norway, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, and even non-Scandinavian nations like Cuba, Nicaragua, South Africa, and Rwanda (Rwanda incorporates a constitutional quota system), all of which can boast that at least 40% of their government seats are held by women, according to Save the Children’s data.

Why do you think the percentage of government seats held by women is lower in the United States than it is in some other countries – and what can be done to change the ratio? Tell us in the comments section below – we’ll update this post with your responses next week.

Scott Forshay is a luxury and premium brand marketing consultant and mobile strategist who’s been featured in PSFK, Luxury Daily, Fashion’s Collective, Business of Fashion and The Wall Street Journal. He is the creator and editor of mobi.luxe. Follow him @mobiluxe.

The essence of any coveted brand is the story it conveys. The elements of heritage, craftsmanship, and creative innovation combine with a vision of an aspirational lifestyle that inspires the desire to associate with that brand.

Historically, this vision was realized on a print canvas, but the rise of digital has created new opportunities. Through video and other forms of brand content, luxury brands have become media companies and content marketers selling a vision of an exclusive lifestyle attainable only by a select few. This new media has not, however, been effectively translated for the mobile audience.

The mobile device requires brand marketers to rethink engagement strategies and devise innovative campaigns that leverage the medium for effective mobile-content marketing. The challenge lies in enticing mobile users. Here are four ways to do that.

1. Produce Content in Episodes

Resist the temptation to unveil the entire story in a single instance. By breaking down the narrative into episodes, the audience has a reason to keep coming back. This approach essentially creates a desire to continue following the story as it unfolds.

2. Communicate in an Intriguing Way

Regardless of the communication mechanism employed, be it a mobile ad, SMS, or in-app push notifications, messaging should be intriguing and subtle. Be cryptic about what awaits the audience if they choose to participate. Creating mystery through veiled communication fuels desire to see what is on the other side.

3. Allow Customers to Participate

Take the consumer on a journey with the narrative. Provide sophisticated clues to challenge the audience by using the outside world as your canvas. Clues could exist on billboards, on buildings, or in taxis. By adding a sophisticated element of game mechanics you allow the audience to become players in the campaign.

4. Reward with Exclusivity

The luxury consumer seeks priority access to, and deeper levels of intimacy with, the brands they most covet. The lure of exclusivity is the most effective mechanism for pulling on the heartstrings of this highly-sought consumer and forming greater connections. Rewarding a select group of participants creates desire for brand association through exclusivity.

Ever been stuck in a long meeting in a weird office chair? It only takes one bad experience with an uncomfortable, noisy (but so stylish!) seat to understand why ergonomic design is so important in the workplace.

Austrian design office EOOS was commissioned to rethink conference room furniture a few years ago. Aware of how distracting poorly designed chairs and tables can be during a tense meeting, the designers set out to create an unassuming furniture line that would fade into the background of a discussion, rather than distract from it. The 18-year-old firm holds patents on everything from the tab on Red Bull cans to the curve of Alessi wine glasses, and wanted to apply similarly detail-oriented design thinking to the office environment.

Manufactured by Bene since 2009, EOOS’ Filo Chair and Table are springing up with increasing frequency. Here, they’re seen in architect Tom Lechner’s headquarters for the Austrian construction company Peneder, the centerpiece of which is a “communication hub” of stacked conference rooms. Inside the fishbowl offices, Filo doesn’t look particularly remarkable, and that’s kind of the idea. EOOS explain that their designs reduce the chair and table to their most basic structural parts.

“Meetings are about rituals. Confidence, authority and calmness promote discussion,” says EOOS co-founder Martin Bergmann. Looking for inspiration, the designers happened across Kyūdō, the ancient Japanese form of archery that’s half sport, half mediation. By chance, the tensioned bows used by Kyūdō archers provided the perfect structural model for a silently adjusting ergonomic chair.

“The armrest of the Filo Chair can be understood as a drawn bow: it stretches at the point where it is thinnest, thereby allowing relaxing micro-movements,” EOOS explains. By silently adjusting to your movements, the chair is supposed to leave you free to focus. There are no rolling wheels or springs, either. Instead, the tensioned arms and mesh backrest adjust to your body as it moves–an end to the clicking of adjustment buttons and the whoosh of hydraulic springs.

For the accompanying Filo conference table, Bergmann explains that the studio took a similarly reductive approach. “It’s a surface that connects people,” he writes. “This is why we wanted to leave the table top alone.” A wide slab of wood veneer, held up by three legs with antler-like branching supports, offers a simple, wide platform for discussion. Below the tabletop, the designers have created a cable holder called a “tornado” to hide the morass of A/V wires and adapters.

So, does Filo really promote focus? It’s certainly quieter, and more unassuming, than the bells-and-whistles office furniture found in many workplaces. In the end, I have a feeling such a claim relies on the placebo effect–if you believe it, it will be so.

Images courtesy of Bene; h/t Stylepark