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.
Are we ready for the disruptive forces of change impacting our working world by the intersection of the digital and physical? Steelcase global design director James Ludwig joined Creative Business Week in Munich to discuss the seismic changes we’ll see over the next decade.
Say hello to The Wheeler: Today, Tishman Speyer revealed the plans for its forthcoming renovation of the Macy’s department store on Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn, and as expected, it’ll transform the space above the shop into a 620,000-square-foot “creative office hub,” which seem to be all the rage for developers these days.
Given the ubiquity of digital connectivity, I would expect place itself to change tangibly, along with how we perceive and use it. Spatial changes appear to lag changes in our use and perception, however. This conforms to tech guru John Seely Brown’s contention that it takes a generation for a major technology innovation’s impact to be fully felt.
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone whose commute to the office couldn’t be improved. The time and stress associated with a long commute are huge factors in the choices people make about their jobs — some studies even suggest it is better to take a job with a shorter commute over one with a higher salary.
Submaterial has seriously elevated the sound dampening game in recent years and their latest Acoustic Surfaces Collection is another brilliant step. Their wall systems feature a high-performance, thermally-formed acoustic substrate hidden beneath the thick layer of commercial grade wool felt, which lends itself to some serious sound-softening. But the company doesn’t stop there – instead, they bring a decorative element to the surface that results in really cool geometric wall patterns that disguise the original (acoustic) reason it’s there. From small walls to large installations, the wall surfaces are customizable with over 60 different colors to choose from.
When you think of a research lab, you might conjure images of sterile equipment and white lab coats—and there is some truth to that picture. Designing research labs requires meticulous attention to the details of equipment planning, environmental health and safety (EH&S) and the processes that support science. While most labs are designed to achieve that basic functionality, a transformational lab environment prioritizes a science organization’s most valuable assets: its people.
Mobile computing liberated the modern office worker from assigned seating and isolated cubicles. Employees have since embraced workspaces that allow them to sit, stand, roam and interact with co-workers throughout the day. Office managers have started to pay attention to these changing needs, making improvements that promote employee happiness.
Lighting is considered one of the most important factors in ergonomics, but too often this part of an office's design is overlooked, rushed, or sacrificed for style. After a while, you may notice quietly frustrated employees hauling in their own table lights and floor lamps to find the perfect blend of visual accuracy and not-so-corporate ambiance. You may have even been part of a group who hacked together shipping boxes to reduce screen glare from loft windows or overhead fluorescent lights.
Nowadays, when it comes to companies looking for a new location to call home for their headquarters or satellite offices, the local talent pool should be the top consideration for most businesses, along with available real estate and the presence of clusters—physical hubs housing a large concentration of same-sector businesses and support services.
Construction isn't the only industry dealing with a labor shortage. Across the U.S., businesses are facing a retiring baby boomer generation and are struggling to come up with ways to tap into a pool of potential employees.
According to Oxford Dictionaries the word of the year for 2016 is post-truth. This is a slippery little adjective because while some things are pretty much objectively true, the use of post-truth in many contexts is merely a way of shutting down opinion. It’s especially pernicious when it comes to ideas and philosophy because it assumes that the person using it knows what the truth is, yet the world’s sharpest minds can’t always agree on that As the great Ambrose Bierce defied truth in his caustic Devil’s Dictionary: ‘Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time’. And there’s a good reason why in the Bible Pilate’s question ‘What is truth?’ is met with silence.
As workforces become increasingly blended with a range of full-time, part-time, contract, and remote workers, many companies are looking to unassigned workstations to make the most of their office space.
To find out more about this trend, we talked to Robyn Baxter of HOK Canada, a global architecture firm with dozens of corporate offices and interiors worldwide in its portfolio.
In 1959, cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman identified the personality traits which go hand in hand with disproportionate levels of heart disease. These include an overblown sense of time urgency, a desire to fit as much into each second as possible, excessive competitiveness and aggressiveness and frustration when other people are doing things more slowly than absolutely necessary. In other words – your typical 21st Century human. Friedman and Rosenman coined a term for such people which has now entered common usage. They called them Type-A personalities. In Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel Microserfs, one of the characters encapsulates what Type-As are all about. ‘Type-A personalities have a whole subset of diseases that they, and only they, share. The transmission vector for these diseases is the door close button on elevators that only gets pushed by impatient, Type-A people.’
ARRANGING EMPLOYEES IN an office is like creating a 13-dimensional matrix that triangulates human wants, corporate needs, and the cold hard laws of physics: Joe needs to be near Jane but Jane needs natural light, and Jim is sensitive to smells and can’t be near the kitchen but also needs to work with the product ideation and customer happiness team—oh, and Jane hates fans. Enter Autodesk’s Project Discover. Not only does the software apply the principles of generative design to a workspace, using algorithms to determine all possible paths to your #officegoals, but it was also the architect (so to speak) behind the firm’s newly opened space in Toronto.
The availability of quiet spaces is important to 70 per cent of workers based in flexible workspaces and 77 per cent of those asked cited good quality wireless technology as essential, according to a survey Workthere and Savills.
Good environmental performance of an office is considered important by 40 per cent of workers but only one fifth are happy with how their current workspace is doing. Workthere, a venture created by Savills, conducted a survey of 200 workers based in flexible workspaces (i.e. serviced office or co-working space) throughout the UK.
We spend 40, 50, 60 hours per week at work.
Many of us are tethered to a desk with an immobile computer or trapped in meeting after meeting in walled-off conference rooms. We toil away beneath fluorescent lights while fighting the appeal of sugar and salt-laden snacks that give “come and eat me eyes” from behind the vending machine glass. And we experience the unique kind of stress that only demanding markets, and even more demanding deadlines, can bring. And then at the end of the day, we’re supposed to jump in our car, drive to the gym for an hour-long workout, and munch on kale for dinner.
Based in Houston, PDR specializes in the delivery of innovative workplace design. Our space is a think tank for innovation and creativity. It reflects who we are. A few years ago we had the opportunity to design our new office, and we became the client. The project was a very personal one. We knew our own office would be the perfect place to show our ability to live the perspective we bring to our clients every day.
Demand for coworking spaces is growing at an average of 10-15 percent per annum across all regions as firms look to cut their real estate costs by embracing the concept based on shared work spaces and collaboration. That is the key finding of a new report from Cushman & Wakefield. As the trend gains momentum, according to the study, developers are increasingly incorporating the aesthetic and function of such flexible working environments into mainstream building design. However the main driver of uptake continues to be concern about the cost of renting offices in prime locations and it is no surprise that coworking is focussed on major globalised cities.
To be successful in the future, workers will require the ability to generate creative ideas and solve problems in unique ways. Senior executives from Steelcase, Microsoft and Bionic gathered at our NYC WorkLife Center to discuss how leaders can harness the creative potential of their people, and their organizations, to thrive in today’s dynamic environment.
Getting the right office interior design can be of huge benefit to your employees, potentially improving their productivity, attendance, health and happiness. Yet, when designing a workplace, many companies forget to ask for the opinion of the very people they are hoping will benefit the most. So what do employees actually want from an office design and how can you provide it for them?
