What the heck is a pedestal?

Being an Office Furniture Geek, I often slip into "furniture-ese", that obscure lingua franca of my fellow furniture shleppers. One of the primary terms in this language is the term pedestal.

Pedestals, BBF on the left and FF on the right.

A pedestal is a small set of file drawers that sits under a desk, or in a cubicle it sits under the work surface. Normally about 15 inches wide and 28 inches or less tall, they typically come in two varieties. Box/Box/File (BBF) or File/File (FF). A BBF is a 3 drawer pedestal that has two 6 inch tall (or box) drawers and one twelve inch tall (or file) drawer. A FF pedestal has two file drawers that are 12" tall.

Box drawers store your pencils, calculator and other small items. My Mom used to call this the junk drawer. The uncharacteristically clearly-named file drawer is for filing.

Just to confuse the issue, some people call a Box/Box/File a 6/6/12 and a File/File a 12/12. There are also B/F files with just two drawers of 6 and 12 inches, respectively. These tend to hang from the worksurface which makes them a suspended pedestal. Suspended meaning it is attached to the worksurface and does not touch the floor. Also there are mobile pedestals, which have wheels. And freestanding pedestals that are not attached to the worksurface above them. Some pedestals can have a pad on top and double as a guest chair in a pinch.

Below is a photo of what most people think is a pedestal.

Open versus Collaborative Environments

Whenever I am planning spaces for customers the issue of privacy versus openness comes up. Do we want our people to collaborate in an open environment? Or do we want more privacy so people can concentrate and do their work?

This often comes up as an issue of tall panels versus short. But it also incorporates, cubicle size, station orientation (Do I sit with my back to the opening or facing the opening?), who gets private offices and common areas like conference rooms, "all-hands areas" and informal "bean bag" areas.

Mark Erickson from Mark Erickson and Associates says it involves hi-tech versus hi-touch. "People often think they are communicating, when they are really only talking through their computers. The contact with other people is often missing."

With Mark's help, we came up with three phrases, probably not original, that describe the scenarios we see most often.

CAVE - where private offices and/or large cubicles, 8x8 or larger, with tall walls of at least 66 inches in height are used. Conference rooms are available for meetings as well.

CAVE and COMMONS - with tall cubes or mixed-height cubes where open areas are liberally interspersed throughout the space. These can be both formal conference rooms and informal areas for ad-hoc meetings.

OPEN COLLABORATIVE - with typically smaller cubes with height of less that 53" so that you can see throughout the space when standing. These may also include areas just loaded with tables. Open Collaborative spaces often have lot's of conference rooms for private meetings as well. (Above; Photo of Teknion workstation at Zazzle.)

I will be profiling different users in future blogs to point out the plusses and minuses of each design. Stay tuned.

SRK