NEW YORK, NY.- A/D/O by MINI, the interdisciplinary creative space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn is presenting Out Of Office , a site-specific and interactive exhibition created in partnership with Soft-Firm, TORTUGA Living and Alex Gilbert. The exhibition is open to the public July 18 through September 06, 2019.

The exhibition explores how the office has evolved from an analog, hierarchical, factory-inspired center of pooled physical resources to a network of virtual and data-driven interactions, posing the question: “If the office is no longer spatial, what has it become? Where work and life are conflated, what is the relationship between the office and identity?”

Out Of Office examines thematic connections between office concepts, objects, and technology. Spanning a period from 1950-2050, objects are tracked on the macro scale of a graphic and object timeline and on the micro scale of the Supply Closet which highlights notable tools and their associated design contributions by typology.

Out Of Office presents two speculative scenarios: one where the future of the office is defined by physical and virtual optimization, and another that is defined by total individual choice. The Atrium at A/D/O has been transformed into Water Cooler Talk, an interactive installation recalling the sense of community that water stations have historically generated. This symbolic heart of the office is updated with a live feed from the communication platform Slack. In Wellness 2050, A/D/O’s conference room is transformed into an immersive environment that projects health and wellness to the extreme.

Out Of Office tracks the feedback loop between design, technology, and office paradigms - and prompts designers to expand their role in the creation of new, humanistic formats for work.

Out of Office includes: graphic design by Studio TheGreenEyl; digital content by Channel Studio; contributions from Herman Miller, Nonfood, and Cher.

The exhibition is co-curated by two design entities: TORTUGA Living with Alex Gilbert, and Soft-Firm. As two pairs who were simultaneously engaging A/D/O in similar lines of inquiry, TORTUGA’s Andrea Hill and Alex Gilbert, and Soft-Firm’s Lexi Tsien and Tal Liu teamed up to maximize their complementary backgrounds and skills across architecture, art, and design.

“The office today is a state of mind. Connection to WiFi is a higher priority than physical proximity to a coworker and yet, the problems of the office space are not new, but constantly refreshing, recurring, and live— toggling between the individual and collective, synthetic and real, and private and public.” -- Soft-Firm, “Really Virtual”
“Humans crave purpose, and productivity is increasingly intangible. The machinery of work has shifted from the floppy disk to the cloud, the cubicle to coworking, the secretary to Siri. Our starting point for this exhibition was how work tools -- in their physical or virtual states -- could either spark or fail our sense of self fulfillment.” -Alex Gilbert & TORTUGA

Out Of Office was commissioned by A/D/O as part of their exploration of Design in the New Economy, one of their 2019 curatorial themes. “The very existence of A/D/O proposes a new way of working, blurring the line between public and private space, suggesting different terms by which people and companies might share space and exchange value. While “the future of work” has been thoroughly explored in recent years, we saw an opportunity to explore the topic from a different entry point, not obsessed with future technological change but instead examining how our values and the design decisions that derive from them have shaped the workplace over time.” -- Nate Pinsley, Managing Director, A/D/O