The astounding rate of change and complexity in the marketplace in the beginning of the 21st century precipitated a shift toward barrier-free workplace design. Many business leaders believed that collaboration, fostered by open-plan workspaces, would stimulate the innovation required to meet the needs of the changing marketplace. However, the need for privacy in the workplace has curbed the appetite for the open-plan workspace. Today, workspace design client-facing focus groups hear these complaints more than in previous years: “I just don’t have time to think!” Or, “It’s too distracting to think.”

Via workdesign.com 

Next month, Apple will inaugurate its circular “spaceship” campus, an eye-catching Cupertino landmark that will house some 12,000 employees of the world’s most valuable company under a single roof.

About 10 miles away in Mountain View, Google is moving past the planning stage for a futuristic campus that, when it opens in 2019, will be the first major real estate project the search engine giant has built from scratch. The central building, which resembles a puffy white cloud, will be along a bicycle and pedestrian path that connects Google’s other offices.

Via sfchronicle.com 

At the end of the 18th Century it was becoming apparent that overpopulation was something the human race would need to address for perhaps the first time. Advances in technology and the urbanization that followed the Industrial Revolution had created a new set of challenges. These were most famously laid out in a 1798 book called An Essay on the Principle of Population, written by an English cleric called Thomas Malthus. The book helped to influence the nascent discipline of economics and informed the thinking of Charles Darwin when he wrote On The Origin of Species some sixty years later. The term Malthusian remains in use to this day when describing the central paradox laid out in the book. This paradox suggests that because population increases geometrically (doubling every 25 years by multiplication), while food production only grows arithmetically (by addition), the end result can only be depressed wages and ultimately starvation.

Via workplaceinsight.net