about viviane kock

“To truly support humans at work, we must first remember: we are still… evolved primates.”

Since childhood, I’ve had a deep fascination for apes. My favourite cuddly toy? A bright orange orangutan — and I loved mimicking it for the family photo album!

Later, in my professional life, I witnessed the evolution of working environments from the inside. A turning point for me was the rise of open spaces. I noticed colleagues "marking their territory" with jackets or piles of documents to secure their favourite desk — a scene both familiar… and a bit primal.

That’s when it hit me:
what if our modern ways of working still carry traces of our primitive instincts?

This intuition led me to explore a deeper layer of my work: our connection to our animal nature — our identity as human primates.
Fields like ethology, anthropology, and primatology are often overlooked in the workplace, yet they offer powerful insights into how we function as social beings: our needs, our limits, and our adaptability.

That’s when the name of my project truly took on meaning:
Nest Your Desk, as a nod to the orangutan — a great nomadic primate who builds a new nest in the trees every night.

Like them, we now shift between desks, places, and contexts — through flex-desking, remote work, coworking...
But this constant movement demands an inner sense of grounding: the ability to recreate comfort, structure, and meaning — wherever we land.

Because yes, according to the phylogenetic tree, we are primates. The word comes from primus — the first.
And although we’ve evolved, our shared origins still influence our behaviours, even in a highly digital world.

Today, three key questions guide me:

• What is our true capacity to adapt in a world that keeps shifting at high speed?

• Are we over-adapting, to the point of losing touch with our deeper nature?

• Or are we, in fact, the species best equipped to evolve consciously and wisely?

As renowned primatologist Frans de Waal puts it:

“We share a common origin… and a common future.”