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.
Uber opened its Seattle engineering center about a year ago with just a handful of people and last month moved into a larger downtown office that is home to nearly 100 employees. There are plans to double that headcount in 2016.
What we’ve traditionally called the “office” is changing. As technology increases its foothold in our lives and changes the way we work, more companies are using less space and fewer permanent desks. In the next 10 to 15 years, we may see new artificial intelligence that will automate repetitive tasks and allow offices to be a gathering space for critical thinkers and problem solvers, rather than a place for work. But many questions remain: What are the technologies to look out for and adapt to? What does a high-tech office look like now? We asked ESD's workplace practice leader, Nathan Snydacker, and technology services practice leader Nick Lawrence to gaze into a crystal ball.
Many companies are starting to build a meditation practice into their culture—from starting out the day with a group meditation session to encouraging individual practices. Yet few companies have actually designed their workspaces around it. Enter Headspace, the makers of the popular meditation app of the same name. Its new 18,000-square-foot office in Santa Monica, California, is designed with meditation in mind.
Different enterprises require different things from their workplaces. It’s time we met more companies’ needs. People everywhere recognize that technology has changed the workplace forever. Today, every company is a tech company—collaboration, flexibility, mobility, shared space, personal choice, wellness and work-life integration are now valued in nearly every industry. And more and more workplaces are designed to meet these priorities, with flexible spaces, employee amenities, open floor plans, abundant daylight and connections to the surrounding city.
Almost all companies talk a good game about workplace flexibility these days. Yet many restrict alternative work arrangements to a subset of the staff. And employees often don’t feel comfortable taking advantage of the programs—in some cases fearing their job ratings and career options will suffer. According to a 2014 study from the Society for Human Resources, organizations were most likely to report that just 1%-25% of their eligible workforce used each of the flexibility options offered.
If you’re reading this article from a desktop computer in an enclosed cubicle — nary a pingpong table in sight — you’re probably not alone. Despite the media’s appetite for hip organizations with open floor plans, foosball tables, and beer on tap, most offices are pretty boring, according to a new Global Workplace Report by office furniture company Steelcase.
Step into Clif Bar and Company’s headquarters, look up, and the bikes and kayaks dangling from the ceiling are among the quirky clues that suggest the leading energy bar maker is not content to leave the outdoors outside. Daylight beams through floor-to-ceiling walls of windows and changing colors fall onto workers spread across the open floor plan. A quartet of open-air atrium gardens offers a genuine slice of nature inside the building’s 115,000-sq-ft footprint. Step into one of the conference rooms built from reclaimed wood and the atmosphere feels a little like you have arrived at a trailhead.
Charlie Grantham’s approach to design is to create environments which promote wholeness among the people that occupy those spaces. In this article, he links that idea of wholeness to social science in an effort to show that human-centered design is a practical way to make our workplaces not just more operationally efficient, but more life-affirming, too.
The idea of sustainable space is evolving. “Airbnb opened up a new category of hospitality, the same thing is happening in office space,” said LiquidSpace‘s CEO Mark Gilbreath. This generation has gained the sense that anyone can be successful, and individuals have power over their own economic trajectories. As Michael Gross, Vice-Chairman of WeWork, remarked about our generation’s entrepreneurial attitude: “that’s not changing.”
There are many reasons why organizations like open plan offices. When it comes to making the business case for them however, firms prefer to talk about some more than others. So while they prefer to focus on the argument in terms of how openness can foster better lines of communication, collaboration, teamwork and team spirit, they talk rather less about the fact that the open plan is a lot cheaper than its alternatives and how they like it because it allows them to keep an eye on what people are doing. In theory, a great deal more of this surveillance now happens electronically so the need for physical presence should be less pressing, but the residual desire to see with one’s own eyes what people are doing remains. This is the instinct that constrains the uptake of flexible working and also means that there is a hierarchical divide in who gets to decide where they work.
The conversation around generations and the clichéd stereotypes with which they’ve been appropriated is a tired conversation, and not relevant to informing workplace dynamics. But the characteristic relationship and comfort level of each generation with the technology that drives the workplace remains a significant indicator of generational preferences and ways of working. Technology is a key factor in the social, economic, political, global, and life events that characterize the experiences of each generation.
Last year’s design trends predictions included bold colors and patterns, use of natural elements, white, open workspaces, and more. A few days ago, workplace design expert, Kontor, released their first 2016 quarterly trends report. Kontor’s report shows that dining and coffeeshop inspired spaces are not just an amenity but also a sort of conference room. “They provide an informal place to connect with colleagues and host meetings.”
It only just occurred to us that featuring a public library in a project profile and calling it a cutting edge “shared workspace for bookworms” would have been a sneaky/cute April Fools’ Day post. Also, we think we too often overlook libraries as excellent examples of collaborative — and perhaps even more importantly, quiet — open workspaces. But we digress.
How does a work environment encourage creativity and collaboration? According to this month’s design news aggregate, there are many ways the workplace can impact employee behavior. Office design trends are making creative collaboration a key focus of the workplace, and research supports this direction.
Our confidential client, an international publicly-traded consulting firm, wanted to merge two groups, its product design/programming group (which creates apps) and its creative services group (which handles marketing/advertising functions) in a new 15,000 SF workplace within a larger corporate office in Northern Virginia. It wanted a stimulating, creative space where its people could collaborate easily.
The concept of place, and placemaking, has largely been missing from corporate strategy. We believe that the “corporate placemaker” has a key role, especially in large and complex organizations, by working for and on behalf of the people within their corporation.
If you provide wide ranges of spaces to meet in or work in, you’ll get a different result. For years, people have been developing the model for the home. They have personal spaces where they rest, sleep, maybe a work room. They have common spaces where they cook food, eat food, use electronic devices, a playroom. This idea of the home came about over thousands of years centered around what would make a person happy if they were there all day. But now, they are not there all day, they’re here in the office.
Over the last few years there has been something of a widespread backlash to the idea that we need to have constant access to information and our colleagues to work effectively. The touchstone for this movement is of course the open plan office but it has become something of a scapegoat given the universality of the problems of interruptions and distractions. One of the most vocal proponents of the idea that sometimes we need to work quietly and alone is Susan Cain, the author of Quiet and the person responsible for the TED Talk presented below on sound and acoustics. But she is not alone, as we suggested in this feature. Nor is the message new.
To nail your new office design today, focus on tomorrow.
Workplace design trends are changing, so thinking ahead is crucial for any entrepreneur moving to a new location or giving their existing office a redesign, according to Dezeen. Michael O'Neill, head of research at office furniture company Haworth, told the architecture and design magazine that changing employee demographics and social norms are making the planning process for office design much less straightforward than 15 years ago.
It is no secret that offices are changing. Some blame it on the millennials. Others say it is technology. Whatever the reason, there is a clear shift away from the traditional, cubicled office. CBRE and its Workplace Strategy group are one of the companies spearheading these changes. We spoke with Emily Neff, the program manager for Workplace360 in the United States, to learn more about the initiative.
