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.
Forget beanbags and ping pong tables, the office of the future will fundamentally change how we work. Through a combination of green and digital technologies, the worker of tomorrow is likely to operate in an environment that is smarter, healthier and more sustainable. Although whether we’ll also say goodbye to office politics remains a moot point.
Truthfully, there are drawbacks to open-concept workspaces. And while remote working arrangements are also in vogue, those arrangements have their own issues. Importantly, neither is a cure-all for what ails companies. At the same time, neither is inherently evil, either (despite what naysayers insist).
In the 19th century, New York’s first women’s clubs provided an essential safe haven. Now the city’s new women-centric gathering spots are looking to fuel a different kind of revolution. When the Wing opened last fall, it was in good company. Across the country, a wave of businesses have recently launched, designed to provide space for work and communion for a mostly — or, in the case of the Wing, exclusively — woman clientele.
Physical movement fuels the brain, awakens the senses and make us more alert. So providing features in the office, which allow staff to be physically active, could make employees more creative and inspire some great ideas in the workplace. Research also shows the average worker spends 80,000 hours seated in their lifetime. So it makes sense to give staff the opportunity to be more active.
Nearly half of office workers (47 percent) cited differences over the office temperature as the aspect of their working environment that causes the most frustration in the workplace, according to a survey of 1,371 working UK adults by Emo Oil. 57 percent consider their office too hot, whilst 43 percent believe the opposite that the office temperature is in fact far too cold for working conditions, which just goes to show what a contentious issue it is.
For professionals who reflexively pride themselves on their masochistic, Protestant, and self-negating attitude toward working hours, architects have a particularly confused relationship with the place where this work happens. What else are we to make of the repetitive and uninspiring office landscapes they churn out? Designing imaginative workplaces conducive to healthy organizations for life and work seems beyond them. Have they—we—simply given up on the typology?
Task chairs are intended for work, lounge chairs are meant for relaxing, and sofas are for Netflixing. But public benches? They’re whatever the people sitting on them decide. At Kunsthal Aarhus–a contemporary art museum in Aarhus, the second-largest city in Denmark–a new public seating installation, called Oui, plays up their role as a stage for communing with nature and collective interaction.
Love it or hate it, technology defines—and continually redefines—the processes, expectations, and behaviors related to work. So, with that in mind, here’s what we see on the technological road ahead, from some near-term basics to visions of an audacious future.
This case for change is driven by needs of some in the workforce who are accustomed to doing their work in a variety of environments ranging from a stool at a Starbucks to a couch in their living room – as they did in college. Experts assert that by creating a design that increases the number of these chance meetings (commonly referred to as collisions), it would foster greater collaboration and the sharing of new ideas.
Since their debut in the 1950s, suburban corporate campuses have come to symbolize the culture and success of U.S. enterprise. But could the era of the suburban corporate campus be nearing its end?
Sarah Buhr visits Adobe's Gensler designed bay area headquarters to talk design and experience the office culture.
Our relationship with the workplace is changing. As work-life and home-life collide, residentially inspired environments are reshaping our vision of the modern office. The more we bring our work home – the more we bring our personal lives into the corporate sphere. In response, our workplaces have begun to feel more like living rooms and cafes than they do workstations and corner offices. Furnishings and accessories are now valued as-much for the stories they tell, and the emotional responses they create, as they are the function they provide.
Coworking behemoth WeWork is branching out past co-living into yet another venture beyond its core office space business: gyms. Over the last year, the company has been experimenting with running fitness classes across its New York City locations, using common areas, decks, and other spaces for yoga, spinning, dance, meditation, and kickboxing, in addition to massages.
My daily commute is about 30 slow, zombie shuffles between my bedroom and my home office. While I’m grateful to say I have the option to work wherever and whenever I want, I sometimes love-hate my arrangement. Because working from home has a way of slowly sucking away your sanity.
Growing a company from the ground-up can be immensely rewarding but also challenging. With the proliferation of start-up companies in this Digital Age, the question is often asked how a business can grow from a handful of like-minded individuals with a common goal while maintaining its culture and staying in compliance with a myriad of laws that impact its operations and workplace. On May 17, 2017, we were delighted to co-host with WeWork Dumbo Heights (Prospect): When Jeans Meet Suits: Keeping Your Startup Culture & Staying Compliant with Workplace Laws. Panelists Jonathan Truppman (Casper), Adam Greenberg (Warby Parker) and AJ Pires (Alloy Development) shared with us their insights as to what builds a best-in-class workplace.
In February 2013, Yahoo set off a mighty global stink when it sent a memo telling staff to forget about working from home, Starbucks, wherever and return to its corporate embrace. The intention of recently installed CEO Marissa Mayer was to increase collaboration and productivity by getting everybody in the same space.
Until recently, IBM was one of the first and biggest proponents of remote work. But no longer. In March, the company began directing thousands of employees to work from set locations or else look for another job, an ultimatum it extended more widely last week. The move is an alarming policy reversal that neither current trends nor recent history suggest is wise.
Sharing ideas and working together is crucial for business success.
Penketh Group state that 80% of companies want staff to collaborate more, while top performing companies reportedly spend 23% more time collaborating than their competitors.
So what should you have in place to ensure your collaborative efforts are as effective as they can be?
Never before have people’s expectations of interior spaces been more complex. Nor, has there ever been a greater responsibility on owners, architects and designers to meet these needs. Now, +Positive spaces™ pave the way to better design.
+Positive spaces are environments that create an impact as a result of the attributes of the space and the people who use it. Whether that environment is a small reading nook or a sweeping botanical garden, these spaces give people permission to work as they see fit. And in doing so, people reach their potential, cascading greater good to others and our planet. That’s a lot to be positive about.
From open work environments to amenity-rich campuses, tech offices have set the bar high. But not all features have created productive and efficient work environments.
