HBF introduces the Motive Collection, a complete conferencing and training table family. Motive's designers, Ayse Birsel and Bibi Seck of Birsel + Seck, find inspiration in nature. Birsel, for instance, based her design for previous office furniture systems on the efficient 120-degree connections of a honeycomb. For Motive, the metaphor is a tree whose roots grow and spread branches.  View Motive video perspective.

“Two modular, tree-inspired bases generated the whole family of tables,” Birsel says. “A branch-like corner leg for small conference/training tables, and a root-like pedestal base for larger formal conference tables.

Small conference tables have a single exterior leg that attaches at the corners. As an outboard leg, it gives complete clearance to the under-table area. This leg is appropriate to small tables, and adaptable for teaming applications, because the leg design allows tables to be easily reconfigured to accommodate changing requirements within today’s corporate environment.

The table’s edge detail serves as the attachment point for the outboard leg. This innovative feature makes it easy to daisy chain tables snugly to create ganged configurations. The connection point also incorporates form and function by integrating the branch-like leg for wire management.

As for the larger, formal conference tables, “They required a different approach to the leg design because there could be four or 12 people sitting around the table, sitting close or far apart,” Birsel explains. “We couldn't have outboard legs interfering with where they choose to sit.”

These conference tables rest on a root-like pedestal base. Bases repeat, centipede-like, and are linked by a spanner that adds bracing, to support long tables. The base, in turn, is made of multiple iterations of a single leg detail.