Canoa featured in Metropolis Spring Issue: Testing the Limits, New Approaches and Technologies.
How AI is Supercharging Design Software Start-ups
Architecture and design’s early forays into artificial intelligence (AI) were mostly confined to image generation and visualization, but in the past couple of years A&D tech insiders have blown the lid off. Below, Andrew Lane, cofounder of consultancy Digby (meetdigby.io), Which partners with design and creative industry companies on business innovation, takes us behind the scenes at three revolutionary tech platforms that seek to transform design workflows. But he warns firms to stop “looking at AI only in terms of how it can evolve their design work and creative processes.” Instead, firms should also explore tools that will help them “streamline business processes across areas like marketing, operations, HR and finance. It’s those who are looking at AI holistically as a business co-pilot who will empower their employees to build new skills, automate tedious tasks, liberate their own capacity and, as a result, raise the floor for the entire organization.”
Metropolis Spring 2024
Canoa: Efficiency through Collaboration
Federico Negro has had a better vantage point than most to see the challenges in the world of design. He began his career working in a firm but broke away to cofound a design-innovation and technology consultancy that was later acquired by a (then) small, early-stage start-up called WeWork. After leading that company’s global design team as it expanded to more than 1,000 employees and launched in more than 30 countries, Negro, along with some friends he’d met along the way, struck out on his own to try to solve new design challenges, with a continues focus on technology.
Canoa was born to address the biggest problem of the FF&E industry - inefficiency and waste fueled by data silos and workflow discontinuity. The team got to work answering a fundamental question. What if interior designers, furniture dealers, brands, and clients could collaborate seamlessly in one connected process? The result was their first product, Tether, an online collaborative design tool that eliminated disparate workflows and provided real-time cost analysis along with carbon emission insights.
From there Canoa launched a robust cataloging tool in 2022, establishing a data link to over 200 brands, 25,000 furniture SKUs, and hundreds of millions of product combinations,. In 2023 it introduced Canvas, a 1:1-scaled second-generation design environment that allows designers to create furniture layouts, product schedules, and presentations.
Where AI fits in:
Fundamental to its design, Canoa rejects the notion that AI will eliminate designers, and looks to build intelligence as a tool. With that aim in mind, the team created Canvas AI, a “co-pilot” for interior designers that leverages computer vision and machine learning to aid in the discovery of new and novel products. As more product data is added to the platform in the form of mood boards, layouts, and product schedules, billions of product-to-product connections are generated that help the model learn and provide contextual recommendations, replacing a workflow that is currently manual, error-prone, and time-consuming.
Words By Andrew Lane
Metropolis Spring 2024
The Battle to Unseat the Aeron, the World’s Most Coveted Office Chair
After 30 years of furniture companies trying to dethrone it, a contender has finally arrived. Too bad no one’s at the office.
Like many great innovations, the Aeron was a spin on a different product that never panned out. In the late 1980s, Herman Miller, which had long outfitted offices with armchairs, desks and lamps, went after a new target: old people. They developed the Sarah, a functional foam-cushioned chair that was a serious upgrade from the bulky vinyl La-Z-Boy recliners of yore. But no stores existed to sell furniture to older adults, so the new model languished until a few years later, when Herman Miller thought to ask the Sarah’s designers to apply its underpinnings to an office chair.
Pages from a 1994 Aeron sales catalog.Source: Herman Miller
Today, an Aeron rolls off the manufacturing line in Holland, Michigan, every 30 seconds, and more than 9 million have been sold to date. It’s also become the white whale of rival office-furniture makers who’ve been chasing it for three decades. That’s because high-end “task chairs,” as the industry refers to them, are the profit engines of the $21 billion office-furniture market. Stylish, sturdy and comfortable, premium office chairs are the result of rigorous design, engineering and manufacturing processes (cast aluminum, injection molding, proprietary fibers), a high-performance seating weapon that can justify those steep price tags. While office desks and cabinets are relegated to interchangeable commodities, the chair tugs at more emotion: Workers become quite attached to them. “There’s an intimacy there,” says Sara Armbruster, president and chief executive officer of office furniture maker Steelcase Inc., MillerKnoll’s biggest competitor. “There’s also a lot of intellectual property and innovation that’s reflected in the profit margins of the product.”
The Karman (right) is angling to best the Aeron (left) by going “beyond leading mesh office chairs to provide effortless comfort.” Photographer: Ryan Jenq for Bloomberg Businessweek
Michael Wolf, who’s written a furniture-industry newsletter since 1990 and witnessed the sector rebound from the dot-com crash and the 2008 financial crisis, says he’s never seen a more perilous time to be in the business. “Nobody knows what the future of the workplace looks like. These guys are totally confused about what to do,” he says. “If nobody figures out what’s next, everybody is screwed.” Federico Negro, an architect behind Canoa, an app for interior designers to find secondhand furnishings and manage their spaces, puts it more bluntly. “Every city is filled with what used to be offices,” he says. “I call them furniture warehouses.”
March 6, 2024
Federico Negro, Founder of Canoa, Featured in Business Insider's List of 15 People Shaping the Office of the Future
Negro, the CEO of Canoa, says offices don't become environmentally friendly without careful planning.
Negro said Canoa, a company in Brooklyn, New York, that reconfigures workplaces, helps reduces waste and excessive costs often associated with retrofits meant to modernize aging commercial buildings.
Canoa designed a digital marketplace for businesses to rent office furniture, decorations, and accessories — when the business decides to move, the items are returned to Canoa and then rented to other customers. Canoa says it also supplies a professional interior designer to help businesses configure their space.
The company's platform debuted in June, when it was featured in the "This Is America" showcase at Milan Design Week. Its services range from a one-time design package to subscriptions that can cost as much as $6,000 a month.
"We've gotten to a point where business owners don't want to waste anything and they want to track everything," Negro said. "That applies to the interior-design space as well. So we're buying better stuff that has a good chance of being reused and making it easier for people to access it. It's a win-win."
Read the full article HERE.
Architecture and the circular economy - Design Intelligence Interview
“It starts with the idea that when you’re doing one building that’s a one-off, that’s called project delivery. But when you have to do several hundred, that’s called a supply chain. It’s as simple as that. Instead of analyzing where things come from and how they get there, working at scale is a fundamentally different framing of the problem of building and operating than most people get exposed to. It’s super fun, something I like to nerd out about. Other people may not find it as interesting.”
Go to full article here (link)