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.
You don’t have to sit up straight all day, regardless of what your mom told you. People need to be encouraged to shift postures throughout the day, move around and sometimes even given permission to put their feet up—research shows a more relaxed lounge posture promotes creative thinking. Make sure to provide a broad range of options so people can sit, stand, perch, lounge and move.
Creativity is often thought of as a quality unique to artistic geniuses. When in reality, it is present in all of us, and something that can be enhanced and nurtured, given the right tools and environment. Creativity is the innate human ability to generate ideas, solve difficult problems and exploit new opportunities — it is the fuel for innovation. Many of today’s most pressing business problems require creative thinking to solve them, and creativity is an essential ingredient for business growth.
From millennials to baby boomers, professionals not only want careers they are passionate about but also a work environment and community where they can strive for personal fulfillment. Flexible workspace has emerged as a way to meet those goals. Workers with access to this type of environment are less stressed and have higher productivity levels, according to a study from the American Sociological Review.
During the recent mediaX 2017 Conference at Stanford University, titled Sense-Making & Making Sense, I was struck by the significant shift in navigating 21st century technologies and commerce. mediaX is a forum and incubator of ideas with a multi-disciplinary approach to exploring how “… understanding people can improve the design of technologies in the areas of learning, mobility, collaboration, entertainment and commerce.”
The link between form, scale and size is one that defines the natural world. The reason insects don’t grow as large as cows is because then they couldn’t be insects. They are constrained because they have evolved to meet the challenges of the world and the forces that act on them. Surface tension is as great a threat to insects as gravity is to larger animals such as humans because while a human covered in a film of water merely has to carry a pound of extra weight, a fly would have to carry many times its own weight. Conversely an insect falling from the top of a house won’t suffer at all while a person would have a big problem if gravity took hold of them.
Global architecture and design firm Perkins+Will is pleased to announce that the Vancouver office of CBRE Group, Inc. is British Columbia’s first WELL certified workplace for new and existing interiors. The International WELL Building Institute™ (IWBI™) awards the project gold level certification based on IWBI’s WELL Building Standard™ (WELL™).
Office developments will become more flexible, efficient as well as sustainable, while promoting employee well-being
Apple’s new home in Cupertino — the centerpiece being a $5 billion, four-story, 2.8 million-square-foot ring that can be seen from space and that locals call the spaceship — is still getting some final touches, and employees have just started to trickle in. The full squadron, about 12,000 people, will arrive in several months.
Perhaps no industry has seen more change recently than media, but what are the real factors shaping the evolution of the industry? And how do we design for them? Sumita Arora, one of Gensler’s Media Practice Area leaders, has a few thoughts.
Amenities have typically ranged from providing daily conveniences (dry cleaning, food courts, etc.) to recreation or health (gyms, saunas, clinics, etc.). To appeal to a younger generation, building owners are in a race of amenity one-upmanship, with popular amenities like table tennis and complimentary food becoming less of a differentiator than health complexes, basketball courts and hair salons.
There is a particularly notable trend in today’s business culture toward the “shrinking” of office spaces. For the last several years, this pattern hasn’t only made an impact in the physical workplace, but also how people work and are being managed, the technologies that enable their everyday tasks, and how each company employs the workplace for its own ends.
Specifically, “less” for the law firm means reducing their office footprint and leasing costs. Historically, office occupancy represents the law firm’s second-largest expense — after employee compensation — and many firms are adjusting accordingly in several ways.
If your office building is in need of a redesign, it's important to consult with an architect to see if renovations make more sense than restarting from the ground up. Often times, you'll find it's cheaper and wiser to build upon what already works.
The modern workplace is a constantly evolving space, and it’s one of the most important factors in the success of a business. The understanding of what design elements create a more productive and positive workplace is always developing, and in turn, influences the ways companies design their offices and spaces.
Don’t wait to design a better performing workplace. With the cubicle farm a thing of the past, all the resources you need are available here and now.
As demand grows for inventive solutions, companies and knowledge workers alike are increasingly prioritizing creative thinking. In this month’s news aggregate, we explore the rising importance of creativity at work and consider how this shift has affected today’s organizations.
At least, as you know it. Sensor-studded office desks and chairs will monitor your every move—and alert your boss when you no longer need a permanent workspace.
Workplaces are shifting from endless rows of cubes to a free-address work environment that allows you to work anywhere and everywhere. You are no longer tethered to an office or a cubicle. Why the shift? Most companies benefit from spontaneous collaboration—when you share information with colleagues on the fly and integrate as a team. The high-walled cubicle—your home-away-from-home—hinders this integration.
The rise of the liquid workforce is transforming the way people work together, with demand soaring for freelance services and a growing pool of talent ready to supply it. Over the past five years, the number of contingent, “on-demand” workers has spiked, now comprising roughly 30 percent of the U.S. workforce. And yet, full-time talent recruitment and retention remain a vital part of the equation, considering clear benefits such as institutional knowledge and long-term employee engagement.
