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.
Coworking is all the rage—though the trend doesn’t come without its issues and challenges. By and large, coworking spaces are airy, open spaces with plenty of square footage and a sleek, glassy look common in new workplace designs. An outlier: This compact, solar-powered, 7-square-meter (about 75 square feet) mobile coworking space by German firm Guerilla Architects, which, if the photos are any indication, seats a maximum of two workers.
With the average office worker spending more than five and a half hours sitting at their desks each day, it’s no surprise that it’s affecting our health. Research shows that an extremely sedentary lifestyle can lead to serious health problems, such as obesity and heart disease.
To that end, there’s a growing demand for designers to create office spaces and specify office furniture that will help to improve their clients’ health and wellness. Today I’m sharing 4 pieces of office furniture that offer myriad health benefits, to inspire your next project with a health-conscious client.
Each year, CoreNet Global’s North American Summit brings together the best minds in the corporate real estate world to share experiences and learn from one another. Held October 16-19 at the Philadelphia Convention Center, this year’s theme was “The Bigger Picture: Geopolitics, Economics and the Environment.” Opening and closing with inspirational speakers and filled in with extensive sessions on a broad array of topics and myriad networking opportunities, the conference is a favorite among end users and service providers alike.
One of the most rewarding things about running a business is having the opportunity to help talented young people grow, develop and go on to accomplish big things within your organization. I’m proud that we are the kind of place where young people can build their careers, and that’s why Gensler is among Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work and on Forbes’s “America’s Best Employers for 2016” list. Growing talented professionals is a focus of our firm and an area that we actively invest in, and we are proud of our ever growing Millennial workforce.
The way people communicate, work, shop, travel and think has changed dramatically as technology advances and becomes more widely adopted.
In addition, new working patterns and company structures are placing fresh demands on a workplaces’ ability to support flexibility and collaboration. Corporates today want to know that a building can improve and maximize employee wellbeing as well as enhance productivity and foster innovation.
As more process-driven elements of work fall to artificial intelligence, the companies of the future will be leaner and more dispersed. Many companies will need less space than in the past, owing to increasing efficiencies and maybe fewer numbers of permanent staff. Smaller firms, meanwhile, may only ever need a co-working space. In between these extremes is a need for more flexible collaboration space to satisfy the changing requirements of both corporates and start-ups.
As real estate enters a new data-defined era, driven by employees’ changing requirements, the workplace must respond rapidly. To find out how you could work tomorrow, take a look at the video.
The office as we know it is shrinking. Square footage allotment per employee has been on a steady decline year after year. With this comes smaller worksurfaces, employees working in closer proximity and a trend towards more open plan office environments. Needless to say, a reduction in square footage has a number of implications for employees and their work environments. 1.) Employee privacy is reduced 2.) Individual workstation square footage decreases 3.) Personal storage is limited 4.) Noise levels increase and 5.) Some may argue productivity suffers as a result of these affects.
There’s no indication that this trend will reverse itself anytime soon so organizations must get creative when planning environments for employees that align with space limitations but also accommodate their employees’ work styles. At KI, we believe Active Design not only addresses these issues but also encourages healthy, productive activity throughout the work day.
Innovation—be it disruptive, transformative, groundbreaking, radical, revolutionary, incremental, ad hoc, or just by itself—the word is everywhere today. So ubiquitous is its use that many people argue it doesn’t really mean anything anymore; a Harvard Business Review article suggests that we should retire the term altogether
But while innovation may be overused, vague and easy to ridicule, at Gensler it still matters. It matters because innovation is what our clients expect of their real estate investment, particularly with large campuses, that it support the business leadership they strive for—new products and new ideas, speed to market, higher employee engagement, better customer relationships, and so much more.
Measuring productivity in the workplace is the Holy Grail of performance metrics. But, as CBRE points out in the second Paper in its three-part thought series, Better Business Performance Through Better Workplace Performance, it might be easier to measure barriers to getting work done than it is to measure productivity.
The trouble is, most workplaces haven’t kept up with either the technological or social changes that have redefined how we work. “In the course of a 10-year lease,” the Paper explains, “it is likely that the technology that enables our work will materially change two, maybe three, times. Occupiers coming to the end of their lease term in 2017 likely made decisions about their current work environment before the release of the first iPhone in 2007, which fundamentally changed how we consume information.”
Traditionally, workplace design has prioritized building infrastructure and physical environment over the space’s inhabitants – the employees. Now, as employers shift the workplace experience in order to retain talent and adapt to workers’ changing needs, office design is becoming more human-centered. In this month’s news aggregate, we explore the humanization of the workplace and the implications of this trend for today’s workers.
Over the last few years, the media has been weighing in on workplace design trends with articles like “The Open-Office Concept Is Dead” (Fortune magazine) and op-eds like “Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace” (Washington Post). Unless you’ve been living under a rock, then you know these authors who may not be as embedded in our industry aren’t necessarily wrong: Research conducted and presented by office furniture manufacturers and major design firms like Gensler has suggested that open plans can actually impede productivity and employee well-being but they also point to possible solutions such as hybrid offices, where there’s compromise between open-office plans, casual lounge areas and privacy zones.
Being a full-time employee myself I can completely comprehend with the importance of having breakout spaces in the workplace. Sometimes however, even when there is a breakout space for staff it may not actually get used simply because it’s not designed in a smart way.
I recently stumbled across a fantastic article on the http://blog.millikencarpet.com/ website that discusses this notion further. In my opinion, the type of furniture you use, the colour scheme & lighting are immensely important to get right.
It sounds more like a day spa than an office: a mile of walking trails, a cafeteria serving locally grown food, views of nature from almost every room in the building – including the stairwells – and a wood-paneled lobby designed to absorb excess sound.
Welcome to French manufacturing giant Saint-Gobain’s North American headquarters. Since moving into the Malvern, Pennsylvania building in October last year, Saint-Gobain has kept notes on the effect of these features on its employees, and compared it to its previous office seven miles down the road.
Employers, building owners, designers and developers throughout the world are showing that it pays to invest in greener offices that keep their occupants healthy and happy, a report from the World Green Building Council reveals.
Building the Business Case: Health, Wellbeing and Productivity in Green Offices highlights the global momentum behind healthy and green office design and operation, and showcases over 15 buildings that are leading the way.
What makes an office whiteboard different from a screen? The simplest answer is that one is analog, and one is digital. But Johan Liden of New York-based brand strategy and product design firm Aruliden thinks the real answer is less obvious. At their best, "whiteboards encourage people to walk right up to them and start drawing," he says. Displays, on the other hand, don't. Even when they're big touch screens, their industrial design language somehow encourages a hands-off approach.
What makes a whiteboard approachable—and therefore, the perfect tool for brainstorming and collaboration—was the problem Aruliden needed to get to the bottom of when Google approached the firm last year to design the Jamboard. Although hardly the first digital whiteboard, Google wanted the Jamboard to be the best: a seamless physical extension of the company's G Suite of productivity and office apps, allowing people in an office to collaborate with anyone in the world, as easily as picking up a dry-erase marker.
Aruliden's solution? Borrow some of the design gestures of analog whiteboards to make the Jamboard feel more like a piece of furniture than a piece of technology.
The discussion around individuals with learning differences and the importance of recognizing ones learning style as playing a role in, first, establishing meaningful ways of learning, and, later on, in self advocacy for securing a means for better performance in school and in work illustrates awareness of ones learning styles correlates to one’s performance. If designing high performance schools around learning styles as a means of achieving high performance is becoming common place, it is not difficult to then see how learning styles which inform work styles (an area of research that has been overlooked in all of the narratives around performance in the workplace) can have an equally important impact on designing and achieving high performance in the workplace.
In recent years, Chinese companies have mastered the art of being bold and taking risks in their workplace design.
By applying creative thinking to ambitious projects, they’ve built a plethora of noteworthy spaces which have attracted attention from around the world.
Now, the economic slowdown and a more mature market are changing the way architects and developers approach new designs but beyond simply thinking big, there are still valuable lessons to be learnt for Western companies.
How many hours do you spend every day, sitting at your desk in the office?
On average we spend 40 hours a week at work, and we spend the majority of those at our desk – in fact, the average office worker spends 5 hours and 41 minutes every single day sitting down at work. So it’s no surprise that your choice of office chair has a big impact on your productivity levels.
Today I’m looking at 3 ways the humble office chair affects employee productivity – and what you can do about it.
Humans spend the vast majority of their lives indoors, making architecture an undeniable and substantial actor in daily experience. Attempts to more clearly interpret the impacts of buildings, urban spaces, and the built environment on our bodies and brains is the task taken up by the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture. The Academy’s 2016 conference recently brought together thinkers bridging the gap between cognitive neuroscience and architectural practice. Much like ANFA’s 2015 gathering in collaboration with Pratt Institute, and the 2012 ANFA conference, this year’s put interdisciplinary ideas and perspectives in conversation with one another, testifying to how a joining of diverse expertise can give way to increasingly complex understandings of spatial experience.
Looking for a new job? There’s a new position in the tech world, in Silicon Valley, Silicon Beach or anywhere else in the world. It’s called the “flexion position.” What’s required to qualify? You have to be addicted to work. You must love a sedentary job that keeps you glued to your computer. You must be willing to have your hip muscles shorten and tighten as gravity pulls your body into a “C” like position. You must be willing to become at risk for developing neck, low back and hip pain, as well as, injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome from repetitive tasks.
Crowdworking, where small tasks that computers can't handle are outsourced to human workers online, is one way to teach algorithms how to recognize faces, places, and context. And with machine learning on the rise, crowdwork is only going to become more common. So is it the bellwether of a dystopian future, or the democratization of labor?
