Based in Zeeland, Michigan, Herman Miller has produced office and home furnishings for over 100 years. Known for its history of design innovation, Herman Miller dedicates research to office space quality to quantify the effectiveness of different workspace layouts.

One technology service developed by Herman Miller is the Live Platform. Currently, Live Platform gathers data from desk sensors in open offices to provide space utilization analytics. One feature that the desk sensors provide is the availability of a desk.

Open offices are spaces where there are little to no assigned desks. Instead, staff manually seek out a new workstation each day. One issue regarding open offices is determining seat availability. The process of searching for unoccupied desks becomes time-consuming as employees look through various spaces.

Our Live Platform Real-Time Occupancy Status dynamically displays occupancy status on a given floorplan allowing users to pinpoint available desks. The website dashboard offers users access to near real-time open seating availability and provides a streamlined process for determining workspace availability. Our dashboard also displays points of interest throughout a map for users to seamlessly locate a desired workspace.

Our system makes it simple and intuitive for employees to quickly find an open desk in near real time and minimize time spent searching.

Our software solution employs Amazon Web Services to collect and query IoT data from DynamoDB and MySQL RDS using Lambda functions. This data is then exposed through REST API Gateway. Using customer-provided floorplans, a map is generated from MapBox GL JS and availability markers are shown using GeoJSON coordinates.