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.
Far more than the standard compilation of desks and computers, the Sugar Land headquarters of Heavy Construction Systems Specialists (HCSS) is a game-changer in office design with unique amenities ranging from an adult slide to a climbing cargo net.
Our latest Design Challenge focuses on creating task-related furniture for freelancers in an ever-evolving and highly amorphous work landscape, an issue that is becoming even more relevant as freelancers begin adding up to more than a third of the workforce in the United States today. Who better to ask about how office environments and the nature of work has changed than designers working for a company specializing in this area for over 30 years?
What do collaboration rooms, touchdown spaces, regeneration areas, greenery, and circadian lighting all have in common? They’re all part of what makes up the active workplace — office design with a focus on employee wellness.
Open-plan offices are meant to encourage collaboration and contribute to a collegial workplace culture, but they also come with serious drawbacks like noise and distraction. New research claims that more than half of employees said poor office acoustics reduces their satisfaction at work. Many feel compelled to solve the problem on their own, blocking out distraction through visits to break out spaces, taking walks outside, or listening to white noise and music on headsets or headphones. The survey of more than 600 executives and 600 employees by Oxford Economics and Plantronics set out to understand what works for employees—and what doesn’t—about open-plan layouts, and to test for disconnects between workers and their managers. The results show that threats to productivity and worker peace of mind are bigger issues than most executives realise, and most do not have the technology or strategies in place to deal with the problems.
Most workers now look for flexibility in where and how they work finds a new survey from the British Council for Offices. But this doesn’t mean homeworking; as less than a third (28 percent) of workers now say they would prefer to work from home, a figure that has dropped from 45 percent in 2013, when the research from the BCO and Savills was last conducted. Over three-quarters of respondents (77 percent) said that they currently work in a traditional office, with the majority (60 percent) choosing to work from a dedicated workstation compared to only four percent that are asked to share desks with colleagues. This desire for a dedicated desk has increased over the past three years, rising from a figure of 41 percent in 2013; but despite demand for a dedicated desk, most workplaces (70 percent) now also include a communal environment to work from, providing a space for more dynamic working.
It’s no surprise that the phrase “chained to your desk” has negative connotations. The notion that one must stay put to get work done is deeply rooted in our society, but deeper than that lies the reason for its associations of dread: People don’t like to sit still. From jail cells to frozen passports, restrictions on movement have been employed as punishment for ages. So why, then, would any business owner who truly values their employees insist they work only in one spot throughout the day? While support for this arrangement may cite the dependability of consistent placement as an advantage, the perceived value of this practice is slowly changing as the world quickly becomes increasingly digital.
Gone are the days of box-like office cubicles and worn water coolers. You no longer have to bring your lunch to work and hide it in a mini-fridge or warm it up on a college dorm hot plate. More and more companies are opting for open-floor plans, fully-stocked kitchens, and fun layouts that boost employee moral. However, they didn’t just stop at rows of desk next to each other. Here are 5 of the coolest offices in San Francisco that take open-floor plans to the next level.
When we talk about designing for climate adaptation, we first and foremost concern ourselves with the preservation and protection of human life. While the understood goal of resilient buildings is to physically protect both the property and the people, resiliency can also have positive mental health effects for building occupants. Knowing that increased stress levels have been found to directly cause greater psychological issues including suicide, domestic abuse, and other destructive behaviors, my colleague, David Cordell, and I set out to explore how the interior environment could actually reduce mental distress.
Technological advances mean that staff can avoid the drudgery of commuting and work from home, coffee shops, or any number of exotic locations. So some companies are working extra-hard to make their offices more attractive places to be.
Picture yourself at the office in 2021, five short years from now. An app on your smartphone reserves your favorite cubbyhole—you don’t have a fixed desk. You settle in, using a different app to set the lighting and temperature to your liking, and play your favorite background music. A colleague comes by with a question, so you wirelessly connect your laptop to a nearby whiteboard to share a presentation. Far-fetched? Not for some corporations. Offices are evolving faster than at any time in history, and becoming more accommodating of individual choice.
YouTube has a slide. Twitter has three types of water on tap. Facebook looks like a mini-college campus, complete with matching blue bikes and helmets for commutes from building to building. In Silicon Valley and in San Francisco, office spaces are living up to their Hollywood reputations as adult playgrounds. But beneath all the glitz, glamour and bean bags, the start-up capitol’s real office trend is spreading throughout the country: small, unique meeting rooms — and more of them.
Seventy percent of U.S. office workers and managers report working more than 40 hours a week, and the majority consider the office the most productive place to get work done. But employers need to take action to ensure it remains an inspiring, motivating environment. This, according to the second annual Workplace Index conducted by Staples Business Advantage, the business-to-business division of Staples, Inc.
The phone-booth-like enclosure features a hinged door with a window, a desk surface that's tiny by American standards but par for the course in space-tight Korea, overhead shelving, and brightness-adjustable LED lighting.
An increasing number of employees may be opting for telecommuting and on-demand workspaces, but 66 percent of American employees consider the office as the most productive place to get work done. Thirty-six percent say it’s the most inspiring place to work as well, more than any other location. But as workers spend more time in the office, the onus falls on employers to keep their employees healthy, productive and inspired. According to The Staples Business Advantage Workplace Index, 70 percent of US office workers and managers report working more than 40 hours a week, many of whom say they’re working longer hours simply to catch up on work they couldn’t tackle during an eight hour day. And that workload is taking a toll, with 64 percent of respondents saying their workplace has contributed to stress, nearly half feeling so overworked they’re motivated to look for another job and 13 percent having taken a workplace stress-related leave of absence.
Of all the memes and narratives that corrupt public discourse about workplace design, the most pernicious is the one that suggests there is a linear evolution to some grand end point called the Office of the Future. There is a natural human inclination to buy this sort of idea, fed by an assumption that what we find most interesting, aspirational and hence what we read and talk about forms a goal. Read any style magazine and you’ll see the same process at work in every facet of our lives. This is why so many people are quick to consume and then regurgitate the idea that what we see happening in the world’s great tech palaces and creative offices represents the apogees of design to which the rest of us must one day succumb. It rests on misguided assumptions about what really goes on in such offices and what these assumptions mean for firms in other sectors. It is the great apex fallacy of workplace design and it is one we must constantly challenge.
What’s the most expensive office space in the U.S. today? The unused one, of course. The Building Owners and Managers Association’s 2015 Experience Exchange Report noted that the average cost of unused U.S. office space is $25 per square foot or more. In the New York metropolitan commercial real estate market, I’d put my money on the “or more” option.
Designing the modern-day office means trying to find the right balance of open and private work spaces. With today’s younger workforce being more mobile and more technology savvy, where they work and how they work also must fit into the office design equation.
“Collaborative spaces have been on trend with many options where employees can sit to do their work — lounge spaces, meeting rooms or open-office forums,” said Pam Tower, a member of Interior Designers of Nova Scotia and president of Tower Interiors.
What does it mean to design with a purpose? It really means you need to sit back and evaluate the story you want to tell about your business, what you represent as well as the present clients you have and those you would like to attract. Your office is not your home but you and your employees spend more time in the office then in your home.
Your life depends on good air. Every year, air pollution causes the premature deaths of between 5.5 million and 7 million people, making it more deadly than HIV, traffic accidents and diabetes combined. The majority of these deaths—about 4 million—are caused by indoor air pollution, primarily in developing countries. But it takes a toll in developed countries as well. In Europe, for example, air pollution shortens the average life expectancy by nearly one year. Worldwide, more than 80 percent of people living in urban areas breathe air that exceeds pollution limits advised by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Revitalizing your workplace doesn’t always have to be a complicated, expensive process. Today, we’re looking at 5 relatively small changes that can have a huge impact on your office environment.
