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.
The way you set up your workspace can impact your productivity just as much as other factors including sleep, technology, organizational strategies and business tools. Scientists have completed endless fascinating studies about how a variety of stimuli that impact the senses can either ramp up productivity or kill it. You can harness these known stimuli to set yourself up to be more focused and efficient, which ultimately could translate into more sales.
As many of you know, CBRE’s Global Facilities, Workplace Strategy, IT, and Project Management teams have been working together around the globe to implement Workplace360, our new, innovative workplace initiative. Our Workplace360 of offices are powerful selling tools, demonstrating CBRE’s thought leadership and expertise in creating high-performing workplaces. This is our latest office in Los Angeles.
CallisonRTKL hosted Work Design magazine's TALK in June, where the discussion focused on giving employees choices in the workplace, and the impact on productivity, retention and the bottom line.
Panelists include Arnold Levin, Principal, Workplace Strategies, SmithGroup JJR; Marie Moutsos, Design Director, FOX Architects; Steve Polo, Managing Partner, OPX; and Stefana Scinta, Senior Workplace Strategist, CallisonRTKL.
Most people will be aware that there has been an historic and enduring debate about whether open plan offices are a good or a bad thing. Past articles whether in the Guardian, Dezeen or across the pond in the Washington Post would typically suggest that they diminish productivity and foster a number of other workplace ills. However introducing open plan design principles into your office is almost certainly a good idea. You really just need to make sure that you provide your employees with a choice of settings that allows them to work somewhere that suits the task in hand whether it’s space for concentration or privacy for confidential conversations in order to make it work. It’s a complex and contentious issue so it’s worth asking where open plan works and where it really doesn’t. If you ask many employees working in open plan offices what is bothering them, they’ll probably tell you two things: that they cannot focus and they have no privacy.
Employees believe their workplace is not making best use of latest technology, but expect this to improve as remote work begins to provide both quality of life and productivity benefits. In the latest Future Workforce Survey conducted by Dell and Intel, nearly half of global employees believe their current workplace is not smart enough, while 42 percent of millennial employees say they are willing to quit their job if technologies are not up to their standard. The research suggest that the addition of collaborative tools and innovations such as internet of things (IoT) and Virtual Reality (VR) will soon become vital to the workplace. According to the poll of nearly 4,000 full-time employees in ten countries, over half (57 percent) believe they will be working in a smart office within the next five years, while 51 percent believe that better technologies will make face-to-face meetings redundant within the next five years.
It seems like we don’t have to wait more than a few days at a time before some or other organization is making its own prognosis about how we will be working in the future. The thing these reports usually share in common, other than a standardized variant of a title and a common lexicon of agility, empowerment and connectivity, is a narrow focus based on their key assumptions about what the office of the future will be like. While these are rarely false per se, and often offer valuable insights, they also often exhibit a desire to look at only one part of the great workplace elephant. The more serious reports invariably make excellent points and identify key trends, it has to be said. However, across them there are routine flaws in their thinking that can lead them to make narrow and sometimes incorrect assumptions and so draw similarly flawed conclusions. For this reason, talk of the office of the future tells us a lot about how we view offices right now.
SAN DIEGO—Modular design provides companies the ability to expand and contract with their business, including economic variables that affect their business, Ware Malcomb principal Tiffany English tells GlobeSt.com. The international design firm recently completed the first phase of construction on Cubic Corp.’s new office design at 9323 Balboa Ave. here, providing Cubic with interior architecture and design, branding, and strategic workplace planning services. This project is the first in a series of undertakings to renovate the Cubic campus and serves as a prototype for future projects.
Ware Malcomb transformed the 13,000-square-foot office space and created a new modular interior workplace standard for Cubic to accommodate the continuously changing needs of the company’s engineering teams. The flexible standards development included suite and departmental entries; branding and way finding; meeting, amenity and ancillary spaces; work stations; and private offices. Many of these spaces were designed and sized based on a modular footprint, allowing the areas to expand and contract based on need.
Is your office stifling your creativity? A recent survey, conducted by the global architecture firm Gensler, suggests as much. The good news: You can do something about it.
The online survey, called the 2016 Workplace Survey, sought to uncover whether a workplace can make employees more creative and entire organizations more innovative. It drew more than 4,000 people from 11 different industries including tech, government, finance, media, and biological sciences. The respondents had to work in offices some of the time and for companies of more than 100 employees. About two-thirds of those surveyed believed that they work in spaces that crush creativity and innovation.
If you want to achieve an office culture with happy and engaged employees, begin by reevaluating your physical workplace. The working environment, where about ninety percent of people’s time is spent, matters more than you might realize.
Some meetings are “let’s book a conference room”-type discussions. They require a level of formality or privacy that only a conference room can give. But increasingly workers are ditching the conference room in favor of the cafeteria, lounge or café. These “let’s grab a cup of coffee” meetings have become part of the way people work, and they’re changing companies’ expectations of cafeteria design and café furniture.
Benjamin Moore, in partnership with the ASID Foundation, recently held its Workplace of the Future student design competition for interior design students (we were proud to be a judge!). Entrants were challenged to submit renderings of a design solution that envisions what a workplace will look like in 5-10 years, incorporating the following key design elements: modular and adaptable workspaces, eco-friendly materials, technology driven environments, and promotion of employee wellness.
Align director Gurvinder Khurana leads me into Mendeley’s user testing room. It’s actually a pair of rooms designed for observing software testing, which the online collaboration platform, which describes itself as a social network for academics, previously hired out externally.
Having the facility onsite has provided it not only with extra meeting space, but apparently saved money and allowed it to raise its profile by inviting in the public. “We made a really conscious decision to go playful so that it was relaxing; we wanted to take away from the fact that you’re being watched,” Khurana continues. Not so sinister after all.
Since the mid-2000s, the open-office layout has dominated design trends in American workplaces, thanks in large part to the unconventional offices of Silicon Valley tech giants Google and Facebook.
Imagine your future office. Before you get there, a parking space is reserved for your car. As you enter the building, you are greeted by name and directed to a free workstation. It knows your preferred light levels, temperature settings and even how many sugars you want in your cappuccino. Sound too futuristic? Well it’s already happening, and it’s a trend that’s gaining momentum. The Edge in Amsterdam is being hailed as the smartest building in the world, and we have a lot to learn from the way it’s implementing technology.
The mobile game Pokémon Go has exploded after having been released just over a week ago. The game already has more downloads than other massive names on the market such as Candy Crush, Tinder, Lyft, and LinkedIn. In terms of utilization, the app is getting more daily activity on Android phones than Twitter and is a fraction of a percent behind Snap Chat. The game holds massive opportunities for retailers and malls while posing challenges to property owners.
Over the past 100 years, how we work has changed dramatically, and these changes have impacted workplace design. The workplace in the early part of the 20th century was characterized by productivity, and workplace design focused on efficiency. By the 1980s, the personal computer revolutionized how we work and launched the knowledge economy. Workplace design captured the spirit of individualization with the adoption of office landscapes and cubicles of every shape and size. Today's workplace is characterized by the drive toward innovation. While productivity and leveraging knowledge are still critical, innovation is now a stated and unstated tenant of business strategy—and workplace design is changing to focus on achieving innovation and collaboration.
Organizations should actively support the idea of well-being and understand the connection between wellness and business success, Ware Malcomb’s newly appointed director of interior architecture and design Mary Cheval tells GlobeSt.com. We spoke exclusively with Cheval after the announcement of her appointment about her new role and how interior architecture and design are changing.
It’s open season for the workplace.
The UK has one of the highest percentage of open plan work environments in the world, and has, on the surface, appeared used to and comfortable with this way of working for quite some time. Look a little deeper, however, and this may not be entirely true. While the physical infrastructure of the workplace has evolved more towards an open plan environment, it is the speed at which the metaphysical infrastructure of today’s workplace has rapidly transformed our approach to work that is having a profound impact on people’s ability to work effectively.
People around the world spend increasing amounts of time in air-tight environments, buildings where a focus on energy efficiency often emphasises the value of centrally controlled conditions over indoor air quality. I think we need to make indoor air quality a higher priority during the design process if we’re to successfully support occupants’ health and wellbeing.
Studies by the American Environmental Protection Agency have found that indoor air pollution can potentially be significantly worse than outdoors. Given that people spend up to 90% of their time indoors, the quality and effects of indoor air needs more attention. Indeed, public health awareness of indoor air quality lags well behind existing concerns about city smog and vehicles’ production of carbon monoxide and other pollutants.
Companies are building offices that aren’t just better for the environment but their workers, too.
When McKesson decided to revamp its headquarters in Richmond, Va., it knew it was time for a radical change. The drug distribution giant also knew it needed a workplace that was not only inspiring but reflected its primary mission: making people healthier. That’s what led the company to one of the latest workplace trends: WELL Building Certification.
