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.
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.
Although the author and feminist icon Anaïs Nin was born and raised in France by Cuban parents, she is most commonly seen as an American literary figure. Like many of the mid 20th Century’s most pioneering writers and thinkers on social and gender issues, her fame appears to have slowly eroded, perhaps because much of what she wrote about at the time was for the time. She documented much of her life in diaries and letters and so we know a great deal about her as a person, including how much she loved New York while remaining open minded about its deficiencies. In a 1934 letter to her then lover Henry Miller, she laid out her thoughts on the city, and especially its physicality. One of the most eternally resonant aspects of her description is the idea that it is what a person brings to a place that makes it come alive. Culture eats design for breakfast. The stage setting is meaningless without the play and the players.
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.
While some recent office construction plans have focused entirely on open-plan layouts and stand-up desks, one particular feature of the modern workplace has shot up the priority list of many companies – interactive technology.
Ten years ago, technology costs represented about seven percent of a company’s interior construction budget. Now, they can consume 25 percent or more of a total build-out cost.
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.”
“Your organization can contribute to the creation of a more equitable world. It’s time to make social justice your business”—enticing words from the International Living Future Institute’s (ILFI) social equity certification program JUST. Over the past decade, there has been growing awareness around corporate responsibility and transparency. For example, B Corporation, (B Corp), a program that measures social and environmental performance and transparency exclusively for for-profit companies, is one certifying body rewarding corporations for accountability.
The ILFI developed its own voluntary disclosure program for organizations of all types and sizes. It differs from B Corp in that beyond a verification or certification program, it was designed as a platform for organizations to voluntarily disclose operations around employee welfare and community investment. According to its website, “The JUST program acts somewhat as a ‘nutrition label’ for socially just and equitable organizations.”
Say good-bye to cubicles—and even your own desk—in the activity-based office of the future.
I am writing this letter in a setting that is soon to be obsolete—a small private office assigned just to me, sitting at an L-shaped desk, with a few photographs, mementos, and the odd quotation pinned to the wall. I also confess to having quite a few magazines, folders, and books strewn about, which seems normal and cozy to me.
What makes F5 such a desirable place to work? According to Director of Staffing Rich James, it comes down to hiring the right people and giving them a supportive work environment. There are a number of reasons F5 has won so many awards not only for the products it creates, but also for the workplace it facilitates. By learning from the example of one of the best organizations, companies in any industry can create a strong workplace of the future.
For decades, many of the nation’s biggest companies staked their futures far from the fraying downtowns of aging East Coast and Midwestern cities. One after another, they decamped for sprawling campuses in the suburbs and exurbs. Now, corporate America is moving in the other direction. In June, McDonald’s joined a long list of companies that are returning to downtown Chicago from suburbs like Oak Brook, Northfield and Schaumburg. Later this month, the top executive team at General Electric — whose 70-acre wooded campus in Fairfield, Conn., has embodied the quintessential suburban corporate office park since it opened in 1974 — will move to downtown Boston.
If your brand is going to deliver on the brand promises it makes, your company needs to take care of what’s going on behind the bright shiny facades of your shopfronts and corporate HQ. Our research has revealed a clear link between healthy workplace culture and working spaces, and the impacts that these have on healthy brand reputations and business results.
New tasks require new modes of working. Today, work happens more quickly and in more places as developing technologies offer variety and mobility to a growing community of creatives and knowledge workers. As the dividing lines between departments and tasks are blurred, the desire for flexibility and comfort in the office is driving a shift toward ancillary (or more informal) spaces that offer more than the traditional desk-and-task-chair combination. So much so that industry trade association BIFMA is updating their categories to reflect the new office solutions being used.
We’re no strangers to the powers of design; not only can it drive creativity and innovation, we also know that it can contribute to revenue, wellbeing, drive collaboration, and enhance our overall work experiences. Gensler’s survey strengthens the claim that workplace design goes beyond aesthetics, but the survey also brought forth the importance of collaboration and genuine relationships in any workspace.
They say timing is everything. Our 2016 UK Workplace Survey (WPS) launched against a backdrop of huge political turmoil in the wake of the EU referendum. The UK’s decision to leave the European Union after 43 years – the so called ‘Brexit’ – polarised the nation, and the press exposed the uncomfortable, but obvious differences between the privileged vs. the less privileged, metropolitan vs. rural dwellers, young vs. old, educated vs. less educated.
When one thinks of a creative office, it’s usually in urban scenarios. Or maybe in places that are technology hotbeds — such as San Francisco's SoMa, Silicon Valley, or New York City’s Chelsea. But, that is changing, and these types of developments are hitting suburban locales across the country.
A designer in the Chicago office of Solomon Cordwell Buenz talks about activity-based work settings and "whiteboard everything."
For the majority of us, the days of sitting at our desks from 9-5 are long gone. Checking email at 6 am when rolling out of bed is not uncommon, working on a presentation from an airport lounge is the norm. With the advent of mobile technology, wi-fi, the cloud and a plethora of other tech resources, the ways in which we work have greatly evolved. These tools have also had a tremendous impact on interactions in the workplace.
The enduring struggle to improve the working conditions and performance of people through the design and management of their workplaces has more than a whiff of the Enlightenment of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries about it. The Enlightenment marked a new era in which the old superstitions and dogmas were to be overthrown by pure reason. This intellectual development was seen by its proponents as enough to convince the world of the ways in which we could improve the human condition. It’s a battle that was won in some ways but which continues to this day, as you can tell from the work of the most prominent modern day evangelists of pure reason such as Richard Dawkins, Ben Goldacre, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens and the enduring ability of people to believe palpable nonsense. You can see the same appeal to reason as firms and facilities managers make the case for a progressive approach to workplace design and management.
As technology plays an ever-growing part in our daily lives it is also becoming more prominent in the workspace; new tech-based products, systems and uses are regularly presented to modern workers and processes are constantly advancing. Meanwhile, commercial spaces have become more agile and the flexible office trend has topped the office furniture industry in recent years. Hence, the incorporation of technology within a workspace now often legitimises a business or brand, as well as creating a more flexible and collaborative environment for staff.
Changing just one seated meeting per week at work into a walking meeting increased the work-related physical activity levels of white-collar workers by 10 minutes, according to a new study published by public health researchers with the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. The study, published June 24, 2016 in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's journal Preventing Chronic Disease, suggests a possible new health promotion approach to improving the health of millions of white-collar workers who spend most of their workdays sitting in chairs.
