-By AnnMarie Marano

You heard it here first: the rise of "the paper-less office" is all a sham. "If anything, there's more paper," says Ayse Birsel, co-creator of the Teneo (Latin for "to hold") storage system for Herman Miller.

With the popularity of LEED certification only becoming more powerful by the day, storage is coming out of the shadows and is taking advantage of all the natural light coming in as walls come down. Birsel and partner Bibi Seck of Birsel+Seck studio decided to address this trend when Herman Miller came to them to design a new storage paradigm. The pair also knew they needed to acknowledge that work and life have truly merged.

"We came to the realization that storage isn't going away. If anything we're generating more paper and life and work are merging, so lots of our personal life comes to work and vice versa, and it all needs to be handled appropriately," Birsel says. "Some of the Herman Miller research gave us the framework to realize that we need to store and help people organize and display was everything they can't fit into their computers."

The result was a storage system that can not only adapts to a variety of situations but also offers more than 80 different configurations, all revolving around a basic skeleton of two aluminum rings. The rings come in five different sizes.

"The reason that we chose Ayse was because we worked closely with her on the Resolve brand. She has a real feel for systemic thinking and can really take something such as a metal box, deconstruct it, and put it back together in a neat sort of way," says Katie Lane, director of filing, storage, and tables for Herman Miller.

Birsel took the traditional metal file box or cabinet and realized there was room for something more adaptable to all that needs to be stored and adaptable to all the different environments architects and designers are creating. "It gave us the impetus to deconstruct the metal box and understand better what storage does and needs to do," Birsel says.

And she certainly achieved adaptability. The product line is made up of 20 different pieces, but a variety of 80 products can be created. "The physical scale of the product had to adapt from one person to many people. It had to go to wall units and islands and could become a chameleon for architects and designers. We wanted to make sure that we could dress it up and down complementary to the environment," Birsel says. "We wanted to make sure its uses could change over time. It might be a stationary piece or an island, but we wanted to be sure it could be turned into a mobile piece easily, and we wanted to be able to add or remove doors and make things more open as organizational needs change over time. We didn't want people locked into a decision."

Because of the two-ring structure, several units can be built together, such as wall units that are five or six pieces long, thanks to shared rings. "It just provides a really customizable solution for us," Lane says. "It's something we can play up and down, and we can make it more or less bold."

Broadening horizons is the bottom line with Teneo as the storage system will move Herman Miller out of the workstation and into the project room, meeting room, and community space. Customizing capabilities can be taken a step further with different types of utility that can be hung on the rings and cladding with a variety of different skins. Circle No. 201