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.
Innovation isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a requirement for survival in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace. Not surprisingly, businesses of all scales — from start-ups to corporations — spend great capital and focus on increasing innovation in their organizations. Whether it’s disruptive innovation that changes the marketplace entirely, or incremental innovation that improves one product from another competitors’ offerings, innovation is fuel in the business world.
Home furnishings site Dot & Bo is expanding into workplace design, with the launch of Dot & Bo for Business. The e-commerce startup will be offering a free styling service to other startups and businesses who are looking to find the right vibe for their offices.
In an industry where nap pods and slides are commonplace, a comfortable work atmosphere has been considered a critical component for hiring at tech startups and corporations, and San Francisco-based Dot & Bo is looking to capitalize on this market opportunity.
Businesses that seek to occupy premium or grade A office accommodation are traditionally seduced by the next big thing. What was once a bespoke architectural design, then became an icon, a taller building, one made of glass and finally the inevitable iconic, tall, glass tower. Now it seems a good number of those businesses have moved on to green buildings as a must have upgrade to the skyscrapers of glass and steel. Green, it appears, is the new black. But is that really the next big thing or is being green merely the last big thing? Even worse, does going green in terms of building design actually deliver the types of benefits that an occupier or landlord was anticipating, beyond the significance of branding and an alignment with grade A quality office space? The green building narrative is a particularly powerful one and the growth of LEED and BREEAM rated buildings over the last decade is proof of that power.
Workplace Insight is one of the most widely read magazines concerning “the built environment”. We spoke with Insight’s publisher, Mark Eltringham, to get an idea of what the future of work looks like from the perspective of one of the biggest magazines covering the movement today.
Coolest Digs Abroad Mountain views. Lawn chair bungalows. And maybe even a furry friend or two. This year's Inc. 5000 Europe list is filled with companies that designed their offices for maximum comfort and creativity. Here are a few of the coolest we've seen.
Notably missing from this list? Cubicles, fluorescent lighting, and that awful recirculated air. As companies build a greater appreciation for activity-based work, improved mobility, and team-based problem solving, it has become increasingly difficult for them to predict or track a workday for one individual, let alone an organization of hundreds or thousands. Each person's brain is wired differently, so it shouldn't be surprising that a "one size fits all" mentality toward office design threatens the ability of teams to thrive. It's why, when asked by clients the seemingly straightforward question of "should we go open office or closed office?" I'm convinced it's the wrong place to start.
Today, companies are focused on new ways to encourage creativity and productivity in the office while fostering a welcoming environment. With so many features being added to the office, it’s important to remember the strategies that truly appeal to workers. In this month’s design news aggregate, we highlight five stories that discuss design strategies for creating office environments loved by all.
In many small ways, we are becoming accustomed to buildings responding to our physical presence, almost without realizing: doors open and lighting comes on in hallways, toilets flush automatically in restrooms and water flows into basins when our hands approach. Slowly but surely, we have entered a whole new wireless world of sensors.
Beige partitions have given way to napping lofts, lunch gazebos and lots of open space. But are employees any happier or more productive?
Over the last century, the office has been continually improved upon, in an attempt to make it work better and be a better place to work. But the whimsy and extravagance of the contemporary office is something new. Even when they were luxurious, the early offices of the 20th century were never wacky. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building from 1906 contained a soaring central light court and recreation rooms for its largely female staff: amenities that were unheard-of at the time. But no one was encouraged to take naps; there were no secret doors leading to interior ‘‘speakeasies,’’ like the one at LinkedIn’s offices in New York. Early offices were designed to extract relentless productivity from workers. The prodigal offices of today are the logical endpoint of a decades-long backlash against this way of thinking.
The UK is on the verge of a flexible working ‘tipping point’ with more than half of employers offering staff more choice of where to work. Working anywhere: A winning formula for good work? produced by Lancaster University’s Work Foundation, and commissioned by Citrix, reveals that 2017 will be the time when over half of organisations in the UK are likely to have adopted flexible working. It also predicts that over 70 percent of organisations will have followed suit by 2020. The Work Foundation, which hosted interviews with academics, business leaders and the public sector to glean insights around the theme of flexible working, supported by research with 500 managerial level employees within medium to large businesses, warns that there is still much to be done to address attitudes towards flexible working, from ensuring people don’t end up working longer hours to dealing with feelings of ‘disconnect’.
The workplace has gone soft and I mean that in a good way. Over the past fifteen to twenty years we have experienced the very welcome development of a much softer aesthetic generally when it comes to the design of offices. This process has accelerated dramatically since we came out of the recession and more and more firms have turned to models of flexible and agile working as a source of competitive advantage. Often wrongly characterised as the feminisation or domestication of design, this is linked to the way that management thinking and consequently workplace design has focussed on softer business issues such as corporate culture, the environment and knowledge management. To a large extent this has come about as a matter of necessity. At its heart are several interrelated issues. The most important is this; if your main asset is knowledge, how do you attract the heads that contain that knowledge to your organisation?
Ever since people first started working in modern offices just over a century ago, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea of a constantly evolving workplace. Trends in office design have tracked those in management thinking, social attitudes, technology, demographics, architecture, the economy and legislation. Yet for most of that elongated century, there were some underlying principles that remained pretty constant. This was true even in the revolutionary years at the turn of the Millennium as technology became more mobile, Internet access became ubiquitous and flexible working became commonplace. Even then, most people still worked in offices for relatively fixed periods and those that didn’t, including those that worked at home, did so in a time and place that aped the structures of the corporate HQ. Over the past ten years or so those structures have begun to crumble and fall and we are entering a new era.
London’s largest law firms are reducing their office space and radically rethinking their property strategies as a way of dealing with the endlessly rising rents in the districts in which they prefer to base themselves. According to research from CBRE the one hundred legal firms that occupy the largest amount of square footage in the Capital experienced rent rises of 7 percent in 2015 to an average of £43 per sq ft. Many of the CBRE Legal 100 firms, 95 of which are now located in the City, have been responding to rising costs by taking less space and occupying more efficiently, and a significant number are shifting to open plan working. Last year, there were 63 relocations, 19 percent more than the previous year, pushing office take-up in the legal sector to 12 percent above the 10 year average. Yet while the CBRE Legal 100 firms are downsizing their footprint in London, international firms are in expansion mode.
Remember when work meant being in the office from nine to five, using a desktop computer, and sitting in a cubicle? Well, the traditional workplace is changing. Offices are no longer productivity factories designed for individual task work. They are a blend of physical and virtual environments that encourage team collaboration. And offer workers choice to work from anywhere, anytime, on any device.
The workplace has gone soft and I mean that in a good way. Over the past fifteen to twenty years we have experienced the very welcome development of a much softer aesthetic generally when it comes to the design of offices. Often wrongly characterised as the feminisation or domestication of design, this is actually linked to the way that management thinking and consequently workplace design has focussed increasingly on softer business issues such as corporate culture, the environment and knowledge management. To a large extent this has come about as a matter of necessity. At its heart are several interrelated issues that have dominated management thinking for the past two decades. The most important is this; if your main asset is knowledge and that knowledge is largely locked up in people’s heads, how do you attract those heads to your organisation? Then, once they are safely in your employ, how do you make them stay there or at the very least empty some of the contents into computers and other people’s heads before they go?
The idea of flexible working has been with us ever since the advent of the Internet in the early 1990s, but it has taken until now for it to become truly mainstream. A report published today by the Work Foundation claims that the UK is on the verge of a flexible working ‘tipping point’ when over half of organisations in the UK are likely to have adopted flexible working. It also predicts that over 70 per cent of organisations will have followed suit by 2020. The report – ‘Working anywhere: A winning formula for good work?’ – is based on research with 500 managerial level employees within medium to large businesses. While growing numbers of organisations are predicted to adopt flexible working practices in the near future, the report indicates that there are still a number of issues to be addressed if employees and businesses are to fully reap the rewards of working away from the office.
While we can appreciate the beauty of the buildings we create and the intelligence of the systems we define, ultimately these things are only successful if they help the people who will use them. Creating successful schools and hospitals is not simply about designing modern facilities with cutting-edge technology. It’s about listening to the pulse of the community that needs these spaces. Understanding its challenges, its economy, its health outcomes, its fundamental needs – and delivering the right solution for that specific community.
The open plan office versus closed debate rages on, and rather than running out of steam in the face of all of the evidence and reasoned argument put forward one one side or the other by many industry thought-leaders, it seems to have nine lives. Those grand and ground-breaking new offices occupied by the world’s tech giants seem to be particularly popular examples of why highly open and transparent workplaces do, or don’t work, especially those headline-grabbing offices created around the world by Google. This public debate has led to some very interesting and insightful discussions in various forums (to which I have contributed), inspiring me to synthesise the key themes into four reasons why a Google office is not necessarily the right type of office for your organisation. Many thanks in particular are due to David Rostie and Kay Sargent for their valuable online contributions to the debates which inspired this article.
When someone says "office design", we tend to default to thinking of the physical architectural attributes we see with our eyes: the perceptible shapes, spatial elements and finishes that comprise that workplace.
Offices with scenic views, as well as high-quality indoor environments, could help employees become more productive, research suggests.
The view from office windows is rarely the stuff of picture postcards. Yet the scenic quality of our daily environments has a direct correlation on our personal wellbeing, researchers say.
