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.
When The Frontier Project, a Richmond, Va.-based boutique consulting firm, moved into their new studio last fall, they saw it as an opportunity to create a place that not only reflected their brandbut also amplified the performance of employees.
How do you get your news these days? If you get the paper off of the driveway every morning and read it with your coffee, you are in a small minority. You may catch the early morning news on TV while you get dressed; you may get some news tidbits on the radio while you drive to work; or you may, like a growing majority, turn to the internet for short snippets of news, using your smartphone or tablet. This is an example of micro learning, and we engage in it every day.
Could a chia pet make you happier at work? How about a nature soundtrack? Maybe slapping some pictures of flowers on the wall? Everyone seems to have an opinion about how to make your office more bearable. Indeed, it often seems like every week, a new scientific study is telling us the latest, greatest way to make our workspaces more conducive to human occupation and productivity.
Let’s start at number 7 and by ‘work’ we are making the assumption that you can do it in a notebook, or on a computer or mobile device. At 7 we would put the obvious, your desk – but make sure you give it a regular spruce up, a reinvigorated workspace can inspire you to greater things.
With the ability to order lunch, converse with team members, collaborate in real-time, and alter environmental conditions such as light, temperature, and sound, our digital devices are literally changing the physical environment around us at multiple scales. As the digital realm increasingly develops new spaces for us to escape, to consume, and to communicate, there will be questions raised concerning the relevance of our physical environments. This makes it both an exciting and challenging time to be an architect.
Informal workspace may once have been painted as all air hockey tables and beanbags when businesses started to experiment with it during the first dotcom boom. It has taken time for the spirit typified by Google or Facebook to filter down to banks, global accountancy giants and law firms. But there are few modern offices across the world that remain untouched by the move towards some form of informality in workplace design.
“People are working less conventionally nowadays,” says John Symes, Director of Workplace at JLL in London. “This is why the semi-private spaces, secondary work-settings, work pods – whatever you want to call them – have developed. They facilitate collaboration which if you do that in a conventional environment you are stuck. Because if you collaborate at a desk it disturbs everyone around and if you collaborate in a meeting room then you take that space away from everyone else.”
Research conducted by the British Council for Offices (BCO) and real estate services provider Savills suggests that office workers are far from settled on the value of many workplace innovations introduced over the past decade.
One of the workspace design trends we’ve noticed over the past year is that home elements are becoming essential parts of the workplace. Flexible workspace operators, as well as companies, have started to introduce kitchens, showers, gardens, breakout rooms, and lounge areas to their spaces. Considering that work is now 24/7 for many (remote workers, freelancers, mobile workers who are always connected in some way or another), it’s no surprise that workspaces are becoming a home away from home of sorts for many.
Workspaces are no longer designed with 9 to 5 workers in mind, modern offices take into account flexible workers, and future offices will too–considering the number of freelancers and companies adopting remote strategies work will predicted to keep increasing.
The workplace of the future is always being created. Every day, companies are introducing new ideas, strategies, and technologies that change how and where we work. Each year, new graduates enter the workforce with bold ideas about their workstyle preferences and needs. New research is constantly emerging that points to new ways for us to work smarter, healthier, and more effectively. Collectively, these influences are reshaping workplaces and pushing them to a future state that never stops evolving.
For years, companies were caught up in the debate about open versus closed workplaces and their respective merits. Recognizing that this debate never led to a strategic solution, companies have been ramping up investment in research and employee engagement to better understand the types of work their office spaces need to support. Even more recently, organizations are beginning to look toward other industries like education, art, hospitality, and more for design ideas that can spur innovative cultures and enrich company offices.
Why is there a trend for many businesses to locate to a more creative office environment? The answer to this question is to provide the best atmosphere possible for their business to thrive. Usually this decision is driven by the need to recruit and retain top talent. As an office leasing broker active in the downtown Austin market, I have seen firsthand the movement for businesses to relocate to creative office space. Here are some of the benefits in doing so, as well as cautionary things to be aware of.
What makes an office worker happier than perks like free food, natural light, or even onsite day care? According to a new report by Oxford Economics and consumer electronics company Plantronics, one of the most important "perks" is the ability to focus.
The majority (68%) of the 1,200 employees and managers surveyed placed a distraction-free environment in their top three priorities for their workplace. There’s just one thing standing in the way of that ideal: the open office.
When it comes to using design to improve public health, Little Diversified Architectural Consulting and Boeman Design couldn’t be more similar. Little, a mid-sized architectural firm, and Boeman Design, a husband-wife team in Chicago, are both using healthy building design as a market differentiator. Both have clients interested in healthy building design as a way to increase employee productivity, recruitment, and retention. And both work on projects that feature new design techniques as catalysts for improving the health of people all over the world.
We have some really exciting things that are sprouting up here at One Workplace and we figured now is the perfect time to share. Currently, our San Francisco showroom is undergoing some new renovations. One of the features we’re most excited about is our living wall that is being designed by Habitat Horticulture. In the last several years, the growing trend of living walls has rapidly increased. Businesses of all sizes are starting to see that the solution to having an inviting, environmentally friendly, cutting edge office design starts with a living wall.
Behind every sun-soaked, pristine architecture or design office, there's a design philosophy linking desk layout and succulent placement to employees' creativity. But as design writer Rob Alderson points out in the new book The Creative Workplace, creativity is difficult to explicitly define, and the creative process varies widely from person to person. So how do you design an office that will aid in the creative process for a group of individuals?
A global survey of more than 1,200 senior executives and non-management employees found that employees want office designs to foster the ability to concentrate, more than any other factor. Amenities like free food, for instance, are far less important, the research shows.
A rigid and unswerving adherence to a principle is rarely a good thing in the long run. This is perhaps doubly so when it comes to office design because the end result is often something that overlooks what offices are really for; namely giving human beings a place to go to be with one another. So, when you take a design dogma to extremes that ignore the human being that should be your core concern, you end up getting something like the office with no chairs, because ‘sitting is the new smoking’. Or you get the office made completely of glass because ‘transparency generates trust’. While it’s true that the Dutch firm MRVDV responsible for the refit of the building in Hong Kong has included some genuinely successful features, not least in the use of natural light and the environmental performance of the building, the interior itself is clearly the end product of meetings in which nobody felt comfortable telling everybody to knock it off.
Do expensive amenities like great food and game rooms really attract the best employees? That's been the conventional wisdom for the past decade. But more and more offices are rethinking what the most meaningful perks are—doing away with cafeterias for more vacation time, for example. While some argue that unlocking engagement from millennial workers lies in playground-like offices, CityLab highlights a new survey that says that it's peace and quiet that's the real key. Carried out by Oxford Economics (a spin-off organization of Oxford University), the results revealed that uninterrupted work time was at the top of most of the 1,200 respondents' wish lists. Meanwhile, none said that free food was the most important.
Small businesses still rely heavily on the traditional working environment, according to the 2016 Business Survey from office equipment maker Brother. The report says these businesses are open to adopting next-generation cloud based and mobile technology, but they’re also ‘holding on to’ what it calls office basics such as printers, scanners and faxes.
The link between scale, size and form is evident in the built environment. As Stephen Jay Gould points out, the principle espoused by the biologist J B S Haldane that “comparative anatomy is largely the story of the struggle to increase surface in proportion to volume” can be extended to buildings as well as animals.
The Knoll NeoCon showroom demonstrated the planning approaches defined by their workplace planning platform, r/evolution workplace™. Knoll now explores five distinct interior planning approaches—Immersive, Adaptive, Efficient, Core and Perimeter.
