This office locker is custom-built for hybrid work
Even for the most digital native of white-collar office workers, the daily reality of going to work comes with a lot of physical stuff. There’s the bag, the notebook, the lunch, the water bottle, the coffee mug, the phone, and the list goes on.
In the recent past, all this stuff wasn’t a problem: People had assigned desks, and sometimes drawers, where they could pile or store all manner of work-life accessories. Today, though, as companies are moving away from dedicated desk space and eschewing private offices, many workers are left literally holding the bag.
SOMA is a new line of office lockers built for the era of unassigned desks and hybrid work. Created by the office furniture company Pair, these sleek, badge-controlled lockers provide a place for wandering workers to put all of their essentials for the day. And unlike the cubbyholes and lockers some offices appear to have co-opted from a primary school, these SOMA structures blend into the work environment by integrating other office fixtures into their design.
The lockers can be adorned with planters, stacked with shelving, or even topped with a conference-style table for meetings. “It’s more like furniture than this basic utility that you’d normally see in gym locker rooms,” says Brian Wilson, Pair’s CEO. “It’s really trying to incorporate lockers in places where you wouldn’t necessarily expect them to be, and to have them in places throughout the plan and not just in one centralized location.”
The SOMA system came out of a design Pair worked on for LinkedIn’s office in Omaha, Nebraska, which was intended to be a mostly unassigned workplace utilizing a “neighborhood” approach to its office design. Different departments would be given spaces tuned to their specific needs, but with added flexibility. This approach, which has become popular since the onset of the pandemic, enables space to be configured based on the changing needs and office attendance of workers on various teams.
The potential for the steel-based system to serve a variety of functions continues to emerge. Combining the structures with other office fixtures and amenities, from planters to whiteboards to room dividers, is also a space-saving solution. “You’re maximizing square footage by having it serve multiple functions,” Wilson says.
The lockers integrate with a company’s office badge or key card system, and also include USB charging inside, so workers can power up their personal devices.
Though the SOMA line was just released in January, Wilson says it’s likely to keep evolving. “Anything that you can see as an amenity in the open plan,” he says, “I can see us trying to bake into a locker.”
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