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.
How students sit, move, take in, share, and ultimately use information has become the focus of student-centric design, where we consider more than just their intelligence. Emotional readiness plays a large part in lifting a student from challenged, through average, to excellent. At the heart of our work is developing an understanding that educational success is a sum of various points of view expressed by numerous participants in the education of today’s students.
Students are very discerning these days. Their goals differ from those of the previous generations. And they bring a strong sense of community, both local and global. To attract and inspire a new generation of students requires engaging environments that stimulate new connections and create the best conditions for learning and innovating.
Often located centrally on campus, student union buildings provide campuses with a chance to showcase major aspects of their institutions. Prospective students and their families often gain critical first impressions of the higher educational experience when they visit a campus student services facility.
The Garden School in Hackney, London, is a school designed for children with autism. See how designer Oliver Heath created a positive space using biophilic design principles.
What can designers of modern higher educational institutions do to ensure that 21st Century students are best equipped to face the realities of transitioning from learning to working? Spatial design can help make higher education more productive by focusing on how to capture efficiencies, deliver instruction in new ways, and work smarter. Working together with colleges and universities, designers can help guide them to making prudent and courageous decisions regarding their physical assets.
Research has repeatedly shown that school design has a significant impact on student outcomes. With learning no longer confined to the classroom, it's important to consider the entirety of a school, not just the classrooms, when planning a school redesign.
To help inspire your school redesign project, today I'm sharing three school design ideas that will help you create learning spaces to motivate and excite students and teachers alike.
Employers and parents of tech generation students are expecting that the college experience will build their interpersonal skills—and empathy. New research has shown that social learning and out-of-class learning are crucial in academic and professional success—especially in fields that prize innovation. Why have a residential campus? One answer is to develop those interpersonal and social skills.
Teaching requirements have evolved dramatically in the last few years in terms of the spaces required, the teaching and learning methods used and the increasing reliance on technology to provide support. It has become more and more important to provide the flexibility to allow spaces to be changed easily. In our experience, the key is to create enough space to allow teaching staff to walk around group study furniture that can readily be re-arranged; it is highly unlikely that we will return to the ‘chalk and talk’ environment.
Prior to renovations, GVSU recognized learning happens in more than just the classroom. The old library wasn’t cultivating creativity and productivity. Alumni recall it as “stiff” and “suppressing.” They remember it feeling homogenous with stagnant furniture, a shortage of outlets to charge devices and few spaces for collaboration.
At schools, classes and curriculums are all completely different and evolve over time, but the school environment never seems to change. Learning happens in all different ways and with collaboration becoming more mainstream, it seems logical that furniture would be more conducive to that. Architecture firm Mecanoo and furniture manufacturer Gispen joined forces to create an innovative line of modular furniture to help solve exactly that and it’s called HUBB..
Active learning allows engagement to happen naturally and at a much higher level. When students are engaged, their minds are open to learn new things at a much faster rate. I try to have my students active as soon as they enter the Active Learning Center. I have them for a short period of time and the more active they are, the more I am able to have them experience the important opportunities and possibilities of a STEAM Design education.
When you think of what makes up a classroom, you may think of desks, pens, blackboards, whiteboards, maybe even SMART boards. But spend an hour at the architecture firm of Perkins + Will, and it’s clear that there’s much more to a classroom than the furniture.
If we think about how the educational system worked in the past, we can quickly see that both the teaching style in schools as well as the school’s infrastructure were very different from the current system. The educational model of the twentieth century could be defined as being similar to the "spatial model of prisons, with no interest in stimulating a comprehensive, flexible and versatile education."
Fortunately there is now a growing understanding of how buildings shape learning, for good and ill. Studies have found that lousy test results are associated with classrooms that are noisy, hot, poorly ventilated and full of artificial light. As a result, there has been a new focus on good, imaginative design for schools.
The only thing constant is change. There is no exception to this rule when it comes to higher education. Technology, curriculum, student demographics, student expectations, campus policies and procedures — all of these are constantly evolving to respond to the challenges and needs of the time.
Not every student learns the same way. So let’s make classroom environments flexible and purposeful.
The physical space is a deeply impactful tool for fostering connections between students, teachers, and the larger world of learning. A space that encourages movement accelerates learning and inspires passion in students.
Colleges and universities face escalating challenges to recruit and retain students, as well as meet the progressively sophisticated sensibilities of administrators, faculty, and staff. As the workplace of the future continues to change, we are experiencing a shift in priorities that shines more focus on the personal and workplace needs of collegiate faculty.
Last year, we ran a blog series on Reimagining Learning in which our team defined six learning behaviors—acquire, experience, collaborate, reflect, master, and convey—and identified how physical space can support them. As companies are increasingly looking for people who can do things like communicate clearly, solve complex challenges, lead teams and define strategic direction, a growing number of learners are turning to any resource where they can learn these skills quickly, effectively and in sync with their busy lives. Thus far these skills have been taught in-person, but today many online resources are successfully teaching them in an entirely digital environment.
As an example, Northwestern University is running a course series called Organizational Leadership via Coursera that equips leaders to “lead in an ever-changing business environment.” The curriculum centers on developing skills that are not only critical for leaders at all levels of organizations but for any professional growing in his or her career – skills like storytelling, communicating, vision definition, conflict resolution, persuasion, design thinking, ideation and team management.
Via gensleron.com
The traditional structures of work and education were forged in the fires of the Industrial Revolution. They shared many characteristics. They were rigid, hierarchical and based on a patriarchal approach to achieving their aims. In education, this manifested itself in the traditional didactic form that was, until recently, seen as the ideal model, based on teachers, tutors and lecturers imparting knowledge and learning to their pupils and students as part of an agreed curriculum and to an approved timetable. How well this process turned out was checked with periodic testing. For some time now, people have been questioning this structure and, with it, the design of learning environments. Over the past few decades, we have not only developed the technologies to allow us to learn in new ways, we have also developed a far better understanding of the processes involved.
The U.S. workforce has undergone a significant shift in recent years. People change jobs roughly every 4.2 years, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s predicted that 43 percent of the U.S. workforce will be freelancers by 2020.
Today, we’re watching an American economy prepare for a liquid workforce, creating “highly adaptable and change-ready enterprise environments” where qualities such as ‘ability to quickly learn’ or ‘shift gears’ rank higher with prospective employees than ‘deep expertise for the specialized task at hand.’ To prepare our young people for this significant shift, in recent years innovators in education have been responding.
