What if, instead of crouching over your desk in an open office, you could kick back in a cocoon-like space where no one could sneak up behind you and start talking? At the very least, you’d probably be more productive.

Steelcase, the office furniture company, will soon be making such a space. The product, called Brody, can help workers arrive at a total state of concentration–a finding supported by neuroscience research, according to the company

Last year, Steelcase embarked on its first foray into more private office solutions with Susan Cain Quiet Spaces, a series of designs for shared, closed spaces within open offices that give workers a bit of respite from noise and distraction.





Brody is not an offshoot of Quiet Spaces, however. The design originated as an education solution, inspired by the way that students tend to look for private spaces within a school library when they want to stretch out and concentrate.

“We had kind of an intuitive understanding of how people liked to study. As the project developed, and as we started diving into what it means to focus and why someone would want to escape, these new findings really helped guide the project,” says Mark McKenna, director of product design at Steelcase.

As it happened, Steelcase’s research-focused Workspace Futures group was already investigating similar ideas around improving focus. Brody is based on research into “Flow”–a state of peak productivity that can last for 45 minutes at most.





“It became an exercise in [looking at] what humans need to sustain their attention, which led to a study of distraction,” says McKenna.