Pods are more popular than ever but offer far more than merely a place to take a call in a busy office, writes Freyja Sewell.

Like mushrooms after a damp night in autumn, it seems pods are popping up everywhere lately. From fuzzy booths for private phone calls to high-tech, egg-shaped meditation chambers and sound-insulated cylinders in co-working spaces, it seems to me that pods have quietly become a standard part of our open-plan interior landscape.
It might seem that this furniture category should be newly inserted between lamps and sofas, but, just like those mushrooms, they are actually the recent fruit of a much longer and larger underground network, an epoch spanning design history but little discussed. As both a fan and a designer, please allow me to reveal the potent power of the pod. Pods are a tool of consciousness exploration
Our story starts, as many good human stories do, in the cave. In many ancient cultures, including that of China and Greece, caves served as shelters where religious devotees could separate themselves from society. A human amongst other humans is subject to social conformity, but by entering a pod-like cave the human is liberated from this pressure, entering into a state of unobserved freedom.
A deep, natural cave is pitch black and almost entirely sound-proof. Without the "objective noise of sensory correction or reality testing, consciousness focuses solely on the subjective self", to quote Yulia Ustinova's book, Caves and the A...