This tiny phone booth solves big office problems

CBC

2 days ago

Industrial Designers Nick Kazakoff and Brendan Gallagher design phone booths — but without phones in them. Their Loop Phone Booth, featured in this episode of CBC On Design, now streaming on CBC Gem and YouTube, tackles the new challenges of our workspaces and creates a space for calls that is comfortable, private and quiet for the age of cell phones, video calls and remote work.
"As people are returning to the office," Kazakoff says, "everyone became accustomed to being at home and having their own private space that was quiet. And then you go back to the office and it's noisy and loud."
"It's ironic that as phone booths are disappearing from the street, they're being brought into office spaces. The product category completely evolved. Our booths don't even have phones in them, but they're called phone booths because it's something that people recognize as a place where you go to take a call."
When a local Edmonton company approached Kazakoff and Gallagher and their company OneTwoSix Design to design an office pod, the designers brought their rigorous process of research, design and iteration to the problem.
"The first version, the acoustics were terrible. We kind of built like a plywood box and put a glass door on it with a gasket and thought we had solved the problem,' says Kazakoff.
"With any product design project the first prototype is not going to be the best designed one, but we used that as a jumping board to create iterations to ever-improve the product," Gallagher adds.
Isolating the booth from sound turned out to be a trickier problem than simply sealing the door. Sound requires a medium to travel through, most commonly air. If you block air, you block most sound. But if you block air into and out of a booth, the human being inside the booth won't be able to breathe.
Kazakoff explains: "With sound obviously the material choices on the surfaces for absorption is really important. How you construct the walls is key and critical but more import than that is how do you design a ventilation system that traps sound but still allows air to flow through. We created baffles within the ventilation system that help block and absorb sound."
"To stop sound from going through a ventilation duct, you basically need to create a path that is almost an S bend, so the air can flow around those corners," Gallagher adds. "The sound is going to hit baffles along the way and bounce back."
In such a small and constrained space, comfort for the human inside is also a crucial consideration.
"[In] an enclosed space there's a concern for people who suffer from claustrophobia, so we try to implement as much open space as we can, have glass panels on either side to allow light in, to allow people to feel they're outside of the booth while they're using it."
Making a practical object for the real world and real people is key for Kazakoff. "It's really function to create form. So the angled sides of the booth are designed to make it comfortable. The size of it is designed so that it can be assembled in one piece and go through an elevator."
"As far as the finish choices, I mean, we're living in Canada. One of the great things about that is the proximity to sourcing hardwood veneer which in a lot of other places is one incredibly expensive and two not as good quality, so it allowed us to differentiate the product by having this hardware exterior which is nice because it makes every single booth unique because every piece of wood is unique."
Sustainability also is a key consideration for the Loop Phone Booth and all of OneTwoSix's products.
"Sustainability has always been really important to myself and to Brendan as designers. In today's day and age to be an industrial designer it's almost part of your moral obligation," says Kazakoff,
For the Loop Phone Booth, this includes diverting material from landfill or recycling. In addition to refurbishing old booths that are no longer needed to use again, offcut waste material from the production of the booths is used in other OneTwoSix products such as discard pieces of wood panels and upholstery in a lounge chair.
"There was enough of these offcuts and offset material that we said we could actually produce and design something using these and it's less of recycling and more of up cycling," says Kazakoff.
Find out more about OneTwoSix and the Loop Phone Booth including their journey to manufacturing it themselves in this episode of CBC On Design, now streaming on CBC Gem and YouTube.
New series CBC On Design explores the evolution of an idea and the path it takes to becoming a item in your everyday life — but that journey is rarely a straight line. Between the initial concept and finished object lie sketches, prototypes, material experiments, user testing, manufacturing puzzles, and countless hidden steps.