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.
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).
From the well-funded and delicately mapped out walls of any WeWork location to the bean bags and rustic floors of your local coworking space, designing a flexible workspace from scratch takes a bit of trial and error before reaching the point of being a fine-tuned craft.
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?
Workplace strategy focuses on marrying three important aspects of the modern workplace: 1) applying better space utilization metrics, 2) optimizing real estate costs, and 3) updating an office space to mesh with current design thought. However, none of that really means anything unless a workplace is designed correctly. Simply put: workplace strategy is first and foremost about people. A company can have the most streamlined business model and the coolest looking office, but if the space isn’t uniquely designed to suit their employees and the way they work best, then odds are, the company won’t be operating at maximum productivity and efficiency.
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?
Today’s ever-more competitive business arena has rendered one-size-fits-all office space obsolete. Nowadays, every work station, huddle room, and cafe can be designed to directly support flexibility, mobility, and ultimately, the employee experience as a whole. But that doesn’t mean that they have been.
Sarah Buhr visits Adobe's Gensler designed bay area headquarters to talk design and experience the office culture.
As we’ve written before, experiential graphic design can help establish the brand and culture of a company through its built environment. A popular way to create connections and pride among employees to their work space is by linking that space to its geographic location. Graphics, such as murals or other adorning wall art, can help create a sense of place for associates and visitors alike.
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.
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.
Every company has its own specific combination of workplace requirements but those in the research and development (R&D) sector tend to have more rigid prerequisites than most.
It’s not just about housing high-tech equipment or even hazardous materials, it’s also about creating workplaces which can allow firms conducting R&D in fields from engineering to biopharma to respond quickly to major evolving trends.
Last week in Chicago, cre.tech and MetaProp NYC presented a CRE.tech LIVE seminar about “Innovative and Productive Workplaces.” Hosted by JLL, the coffee-fueled event brought together some of the brightest workplace strategy experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities that come with today’s rapidly changing office technology.
While collaboration and social collisions have been emphasized in workplace design over the past few years, the pendulum is swinging back toward a place where introverts can shine with plenty of quiet corners, furry friends and do-it-yourself office design.
“We have reached a saturation point,” Gensler head of design Phillipe Pare said. “It is very hard for us to really relax.”
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.
The thing I love about technology is that is constantly changing. New advances render old ones obsolete and inventive companies are always putting new spins on how solutions are implemented. This is also why tech can be incredibly frustrating. For someone that doesn’t have the time to keep up with the undulations of latest and greatest innovations, it can be a daunting task to figure out which offerings to choose.
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.
