Austrian Company Makes Dumb Desks Smart

LogicData's Technology Even Keeps Track of How Often the Furniture is Used
LogicData President Stefan Knappitsch shows the different components that go into a hydraulic desk. Photo: Justin Schmidt/CoStar Group
LogicData President Stefan Knappitsch shows the different components that go into a hydraulic desk. Photo: Justin Schmidt/CoStar Group

Austrian company LogicData's primary mission in business involves building the brain and movement into the newest office desks.

The company showed off just how from a brightly-colored booth inside Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. For visitors to NeoCon, one of the largest commercial design confabs in the world, LogicData representatives showcased the office desk innards that make today’s desks operate nothing like the days of yore.

Increasingly, desks have movement. They go up and down as people choose to sit or stand at their desk. These desks can be fully integrated into an the office environment with built-in power strips and ports of all kinds along with the hydraulics that raise the desk up and down.

“We make it plug and play,” said Stefan Knappitsch, the company’s president.

The company sells directly to original equipment manufacturers, so they attending the show to ensure customers such as Herman Miller remain a customer as well as helping educate commercial designers on these types of office desks.

Knappitsch eagerly shows off the latest -- a hydraulic system that moves the desk up and down at a much quicker rate than others in the booth.

One of the smart products the company features includes a sensor under the desk that collects data on the desk’s usage. That may seem creepy, but that technology may prove important in today’s open environments where employees no longer have assigned desks. They “hot desk” – just picking up whatever desk is available – or they make a reservation, so-called hoteling.

Derek Timm, a product manager for Petaluma, California-based Workrite Ergonomics and another LogicData customer, said collecting desk usage data is more common in Europe than in the U.S. but is “trickling into the U.S.” In Europe, companies focus more on how to efficiently use space, Timm said.

For example, he said a company may determine that “80% of employees are in the office at any given time” but the space exceeds the need by 30%. They can then shrink the space. Should overflow be needed, employees can be shifted to collaboration space designed into the space elsewhere, Timms said.