Case study: Volume Products Limited Aluminium inspires better working environments
When Volume Products Limited first set out to revolutionise the world of office and workplace furniture, they chose aluminium for its light weight, practicality, flexibility and environmental advantages.
Five years on, Volume has created an award-winning range of innovative and versatile mobile offices and workstations which are used by high profile clients such as HSBC, Egg, Yorkshire Building Society and Fitness First.
This is great news for The Power of Aluminium, set up to promote the use of aluminium extrusion by engineers, designers and architects. The organisation’s head, Dave Humphries said: “It’s really inspiring to see aluminium extrusions being used in such a creative and visionary way - helping people to feel comfortable and be productive at work. This is a perfect illustration of how practical and cost-effective it can be.”
The key to Volume’s rapid growth and success, according to their Managing Director Mark Partridge, is that they were among the first to think about how people would be working in the future. “The market was flooded with beautiful quality desks and seating, but no-one was giving much thought to the way people really like to work. We realised that flexibility and levels of privacy were going to play a huge part in years to come.”
In order to innovate fast and bring new products to market at the right speed, Volume needed to work with materials which would give them real flexibility.
“Aluminium has brought us enormous benefits”, says Mark Partridge, “especially the use of extrusions -their manufacturing process has been our saviour. The infinite number of design details we’re able to add and machine in, coupled with cost-effective tooling, have allowed us to enter the market with an extremely sophisticated range of products. We’re able to offer very high quality finishes at an affordable price.”
Volume’s customers love aluminium too, both for its practical and environmental benefits. “Many of our larger corporate and banking clients demand eco-friendly suppliers and products. Because we use anodised finish only on the extrusions and fabrications, all our aluminium parts are 100% recyclable – and recycling aluminium only uses 5% of the energy used in initial production. Equally, our A&D clients love the inherent architectural purity of aluminium as well as what we’re able to do with it through the extrusion process. The guys in our production department love it as well, because it’s flexible, lightweight and quick and simple to assemble.”
Macropod - a fully mobile, self-contained office and workstation.
Privacy without walls
One of the first and most popular products in Volume’s highly successful range was Macropod® - a fully mobile, self-contained office and workstation with integrated lighting, desk lift, power and storage. It opens to create a spacious, efficient and ergonomic workspace. Clever use of translucency and 120 degrees of curved screen give the user a light and airy but secluded working environment - privacy without walls.
The wings of the Macropod® can be folded and locked with equipment inside, and it can easily be moved from space to space, floor to floor, or building to building. This allows companies to be very agile and mobile as their business grows or changes - saving the cost of expensive refits and complex removals.
Since this early innovation, Volume has gone on to design and create an extensive range of workstations, screening and storage ideas that
Environmentally friendly - Aluminium uses only 5% of production energy to recycle.
Airea - comfortable, versatile, expandable.
A plug-and-play office in half an hour
The most recent of these is Airea – an entirely new concept in comfortable, versatile, expandable private rooms which are easily assembled and ready for use in 30 minutes or even less, by two people using just three tools.
It’s hard to believe, but Airea is a “plug-and-play” product, complete with its own power sockets, neatly hidden cabling, dimmable downlighting, smooth sliding doors, shelving, storage and ventilation. There are no partition walls, no fixings to the floor, and no wiring requirements.
This amazing breakthrough uses a system of power and lighting hoops, screens and roofs in a creative combination of hard and soft materials to resolve some of the most important workspace issues – acoustic and visual privacy.
Easily configured into simple cube or round standalone spaces, larger lozenge or rectangular rooms or even custom designs, Airea can be broken down and re-configured somewhere else with ease. With very little else on the market to compete with it, this is one of the most visionary and future-orientated work, meeting and resource rooms available today.
Basing Airea’s unique design on aluminium extrusions gives it strength, durability and efficiency, with every piece fitting smoothly into place.
Winning awards
Not surprisingly, Volume has already won a string of prestigious awards for the company’s innovative ideas and designs. These include Best New Product Award (flexible workspace furniture) Workplace ’01, 2005 FX International Design Awards (street furniture system), and 2005 IF Product Design Awards (street furniture system).
It is easily configured into simple cube or round standalone spaces
