Contract furnishings provider, Hightower received multiple awards at NeoCon 2021, including IIDA's 'Best Small Showroom' (under 4,000 sf) and 'Best of Competition' for its newly designed Chicago showroom.
Humanscale welcomes Elizabeth Margles to its Marketing Division in the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Margles comes to Humanscale with twenty years of experience in design, fashion and retail and a background in public relations and advertising.
The exclusive relationship with Kontrol's BioCloud® Technology will provide real-time detection of airborne pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 to help make workplaces safer as organizations return to the office.
The conversations around Active Design continue! Designers, manufacturers and customers are discussing what it is, what are the benefits and how it is implemented? In the simplest of terms, Active Design is an approach to the development of buildings and workplaces that make daily physical activity more accessible for employees. For a more thorough explanation, check out this post on Active Design.
Every office landlord wants the best and highest-paying tenants for their buildings. As Landlordology points out, the key to attracting such tenants is courting millennials, or the workers born between 1982 and 2004 “who practically entered the world with smartphones in their hands.”
Just look at the millennial-heavy TAMI (technology, advertising, media and information services) sector, which made up 72% of Manhattan’s new office leases in the first quarter of 2016, according to Cushman & Wakefield.
Many companies are still using outdated metrics to determine how much — and what type of — space, they need, and missing significant opportunities. From smart lighting to chair sensors and wearable tech, we are now living in an age of plentiful workplace data. New sources of information are a boon to professionals trying to determine the right amount, type, and configuration of space that will keep employees, CEOs, and managers happy — all at once.
CBRE has set the record straight—most Millennials are not city-flocking suburbia haters. In a recent study, the firm dispels the myth that American suburbs are dying, saying that statement is grossly exaggerated. Recent census data shows 30% percent of Millennials live within urban areas—and the remaining 70% are in no rush to move downtown. According to US Census data, the nation is less urban than it was in 2000.
The science of the workplace has gained a lot of interest over the last few years, highlighting recurring patterns of human behaviour as well as how organisational behaviour relates to office design. In theory, knowledge from this growing body of research could be used to inform design. In practice, this is rarely the case. A survey of 420 architects and designers highlighted a large gap between research and practice: while 80 percent of respondents agreed that more evidence was needed on the impact of design, 68 percent admitted they never reviewed literature and 71 percent said they never engaged in any sort of post-occupancy evaluation. Only 5 percent undertake a formal POE and just 1 percent do so in a rigorous fashion. Not a single practitioner reported a report on the occupied scheme, despite its importance in understanding the impact of a design.
Over the last year, we’ve been excitedly planning our new office space. If you’ve ever been through an office renovation, you have a unique appreciation for what this endeavor looks like!
You’d be surprised to learn how important being intentional with space is. Admittedly, this isn’t something I would normally think of unless there was reason to in the moment. Going through this exercise has been a much needed and growth-oriented opportunity for me as a leader in my company. What I’ve come to see is that good design, like a good voice-over, shouldn’t stand out. It blends in because good office design, like a good voice-over communicating a message, is merely a vehicle- it’s a palatable expression that supports the ultimate goal. To say it differently, the spoken word is how people hear a message. Design is how people experience their work.
Google has recently opened its new London office, set to be the company’s largest in Europe – we take a tour around the interiors to find out what it is that makes Google’s working environment so unique.
Millennials are a driving force in the future of the workplace, pushing companies to modernize in order to keep up with the competition.
Disengagement in the workplace, and the $415 billion dollars it costs the global economy each year, has become an outright epidemic. According to “360 Steelcase Global Report: Engagement and the Global Workplace,” 37% of employees worldwide are highly or somewhat disengaged at work, with the majority of the others surveyed falling somewhere on the low- to middle-end of the curve. In fact, of the more than 12,000 individuals surveyed, just 13% report being both highly engaged and highly satisfied with their organization and workplace.
It was a reminder of just how much the world of work has changed in a few decades. Almost five years ago I started writing Working Lives, a weekly feature for the Financial Times chronicling changes in work, the creation of new types of job and the death of others, as well as trends in office life.
Are employees pining for their old cubicles? And if we take a cue from home, the kitchen is the center of family gatherings, making it now number one on the list of company amenities. Robin Weckesser, founder and president of a3 Workplace Strategies, discussed this and other water cooler buzz in this GlobeSt.com office trends exclusive.
Technology is changing the way we live. Innovative products like smartwatches, virtual assistants like Siri and Cortana, and self-driving cars are raising the bar on expectations.
So why shouldn’t that change be reflected in the way we work?
Business Insider spoke to Dave Wright, the chief strategy officer at cloud computing business ServiceNow about what they’re doing to improve processes and productivity and the workplace, as well as trends we’re likely to see in the future.
This ability to foresee and adjust defines how we approach our everyday. Arguably, how we adapt is very much constructed by our surroundings, and more specifically, the built environment. Because, the reality is, we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors.
It’s easy to see how social media shapes our interactions on the internet, through web browsers, feeds, and apps. Yet technology is also shaping the physical world, influencing the places we go and how we behave in areas of our lives that didn’t heretofore seem so digital. Think of the traffic app Waze rerouting cars in Los Angeles and disrupting otherwise quiet neighborhoods; Airbnb parachuting groups of international tourists into residential communities; Instagram spreading IRL lifestyle memes; or Foursquare sending traveling businessmen to the same cafe over and over again.
We could call this strange geography created by technology "AirSpace." It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture.
It may be sweltering for most of July and August, with long lingering days, but when winter comes, with its shortness of sunlight, MIT will be ready.
In fall 2015, Ariel Anders, a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), applied for and received a MindHandHeart Innovation Fund grant to install light-therapy lamps in accessible areas at MIT as a way to combat seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a type of depression that occurs at a certain time each year, usually in the fall or winter.
Looking back on the changes in office design over the past 30 years, it is easy to see why some employees feel as if they have been subjects in a giant ongoing experiment.
For decades the office has moved from private, to open plan and more recently, no desk at all. These changes have been driven almost simultaneously by the push to reduce real estate cost and to also increase collaboration among employees.
According to the Steelcase Global Report, twenty percent of employees are highly engaged and highly satisfied with their workplace in the United Arab Emirates, making it one of the most engaged and satisfied nations. As someone born and raised in Dubai, it did not surprise me to find that our country has some of the most engaged and satisfied workers in the world. I have seen first-hand how the culture has evolved, workplaces have transformed and people have come to appreciate where and how they work.
You’re reading this at your desk. You are slumped, as usual, over your keyboard. Your hand rests heavily on your mouse. Occasionally you twitch it to open a new tab or email.
The only other movement you make is the flickering of your eyes from webpage to webpage. And now, you learn, clicking on a headline and casting your eye down the article, that office workers - people like you - must exercise for an hour a day to counter the death risk of modern working lifestyles.
What I call physical activity is limited to stowing my luggage into the overhead bin. I could include making the steep descent to the mailbox at the foot of our hill or climbing the stairs to my second-floor office. Rarely was my doctor amused during my annual checkups when these were my answers about regular exercise. A checkup two years ago was different. He wondered what I had been doing to reverse the annual weight gain, cholesterol increase, blood pressure rise. He remained in wonderment when I told him that, for three, months, I had been standing up during part of my workday.
The office of the future offers many places to sit and work, but no place to call your own.
As it has for at least a decade, the struggle to define the office of the future will be played out in the context of the open floor plan, a partitionless space with desks in facing rows or clusters of four, six, or eight. It would be reductive to blame Dilbert for the death of the semi-enclosed cubicle, but the name of the comic strip, which came up frequently in interviews for this essay, serves as a convenient shorthand for everything workers, especially young ones, find soul-crushingly oppressive about traditional office design. Some variation of the open plan is the overwhelming choice for organizations with any pretense of hipness—which today is almost all of them, from Brooklyn start-ups to the General Services Administration, whose million-square-foot headquarters in Washington is being renovated (by Shalom Baranes, with Gensler doing interior design) to achieve what Janet Pogue, Gensler’s head of global workplace research, describes as “a more open and energetic workspace reflective of GSA’s sense of transparency and shared organizational culture.”
