COLOGNE – What role does the trade fair
play in our increasingly digitized world?
And will its format have to change if it’s to
remain relevant? What better place to find
answers to our questions than Orgatec,
Germany’s biennial office-furniture fair?
The 2018 edition revealed the increasingly
fading boundaries between products for the
contract, home, workspace and hospitality
markets. To highlight brands that are mov-
ing with the times, we honoured the most
innovative uses of colour, light and material
among exhibitors’ stands in a special edition
of the Frame Awards.
Our jury emphasized the infeasibility
of maintaining the trade fair’s traditional
perimeters. Both organizers and exhibi-
tors need to understand their audience: a
new generation with different needs and
expectations. More and more visitors are
well-informed, digital-savvy millennials.
‘You might think it’s superficial, but creat-
ing a space that sparks people to take out
their phones, photograph and share their
experiences with their own online com-
munities is very important in today’s short-
attention-span economy,’ says jury member
Mike Meiré of branding agency Meiré and
Meiré. Posting photos of the physical reality,
he adds, ‘is a way to expand the event to the
online sphere’.
Apart from visitors’ handheld devices,
technology was hard to find among the 753
‘brand showcases’ at Orgatec. Jury mem-
ber William de Boer of UNStudio thinks he
knows the reason. ‘In the building industry,
processes are slow, whereas the world of
technology is fast-paced,’ he says. ‘Finding a
balance, a way to integrate tech – preferably
in an invisible way – is a big challenge.’ De
Boer is an advocate of data-free sanctuaries –
quiet havens for switching off – that provide
an escape from the buzz and bustle of the fair.
Meiré wants to see a greater focus on
sustainable design and more restraint when
facing the temptation of ‘the next best thing’.
If our obsession with upgrading and updating
leads to mountains of waste, why not redirect
reuse into the design of trade-fair stands? De
Boer shares that vision. He looks forward to
a more proliferate use of sustainable building
materials in the near future and, consequently,
less dependency on new gadgets.Should trade-fair stands be more performa-
tive? According to Robert Thiemann, the
director of Frame, we zero in on customer
experience and forget that trade-fair stands
can also be platforms vying for the atten-
tion of business stakeholders. Indeed,
Orgatec 2018 saw a shift towards the more
experiential aspects of product display.
Two stand designs, vastly different from
each other, stood out in particular: Kokuyo,
a space that was stark and almost other-
worldly, and Vitra’s Work Campus, inviting,
warm, and sweeping, it seemed the perfect
environment for fluidity of movement and
communication. The polarity involved dem-
onstrated the differences in the two exhibi-
tion designers and in their responses to the
needs of the market, as well as to the opin-
ions of jury members.
Our selection of the overall winner
confirms that a cinematic experience which
harnesses light and material in an innova-
tive way could be the future of the trade fair.
Think of how this might impact B2B indus-
tries, closed off from the outside world: if
they invested more in ‘experience’, their ven-
ture could be a means of achieving greater
brand equity.The jury of Frame Awards Orgatec consisted
of UNStudio product designer and associate
William de Boer; Apameh Ruckert, head of
architecture and human interface design at
Liganova; Schmidhuber’s managing partner
Lennart Wiechell; Meiré and Meiré founder
Mike Meiré; Hicklvesting PR’s cofounder,
Barbara Hickl; Qvest founder and entrepre-
neur Michael Kaune; and Frame magazine’s
managing editor, Floor Kuitert.Frame Awards Orgatec was made possible
by our partner, IBA, the German trade asso-
ciation for the design of work environments.120 SPACES