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.
Big open offices are the modern—and perhaps broken—standard, but acoustically, they're nightmares: cavernous concrete bunkers where people are afraid to speak above a whisper. "No one really thinks about the quality of sound in a workplace," says Benjamin Hubert of Layer Design. "Everyone loves these huge concrete open-plan workspaces, because they're visually cool, but the sound is wearing."
Biophilia is a vast topic as old as the Ancient Greek civilization. In modern civilization, interest in topic has been piqued by Edward O. Wilson’s seminal volume on the topic, and formalized with the introduction of the WELL Building Standard. While studying for my WELL AP exam, I came across a document outlining 14 unique phases of this area from Terrapin Bright Green. Biophilia is generally defined as our connection to the world of living things, and the following phases help connect those ideas to design details and concepts.
When, as part of its long-term collaboration with the nonprofit Hazelden Foundation, Hammel, Green and Abrahamson began work on the new Hazelden Betty Ford Center, an outpatient alcohol-and-drug clinic in Los Angeles, the firm knew there was only one woman to lead the job: Alyssa Scholz, principal and director of interior design. After stints at Taylor, Perkins+Will, and Gensler, Scholz came to HGA in 2014, bringing her understanding of user-experience design to the firm’s services in the healthcare sector. She discusses her influences, thoughts on the state of healthcare design, and hopes for the future.
Leaders of startup and emerging companies looking to rethink their office space might want to take a few cues from the aging, cluttered garages they drive by each day on the way to work.
Designed by Zaha Hadid, Volu is a contemporary dining pavilion concept that fuses computational design, lightweight engineering and precision fabrication. The design embeds the tectonics of manufacture within the form itself.
Few would dispute that when confronted with Mother Nature’s awesome violence, human beings seem to be terrifyingly vulnerable and perishable creatures. While we share with other animals a mortal and easily-harmed body, one thing distinguishes humanity: a refusal to bow to fate. The human capacity for ingenuity has helped us manage some of the worst catastrophes nature has thrown at us, and engineers and architects have been especially innovative in developing daringly clever technologies and designs for buildings that can survive the tumults the earth and its occasionally savage climate hurls at them.
Every year, the design world hotly anticipates Pantone's decision for Color of the Year. And this year, the designers that set the tone for the fashion, beauty, and interior design world just couldn't make up their minds, and decided to pick two colors for the first time ever.
The idea of balancing form and function often dominates conversations about design, and “business thinking” — the consideration of factors like distribution, pricing models and costs — is typically left for a separate discussion. Thinking about viability can be seen as constraining, a validation exercise to be pushed off until a team has to “make the case” for their idea.
Mexican-based design consultancy nos creates and develops projects that focus on their social impact. Their business model is all about creating alliances with key partners, maintaining them flexible and updated. on this occasion, they present us with two pieces of furniture that share characteristics such as modularity and easy assemblage. The ‘tessella desk’ was designed for open and collaborative spaces. its shape merges two hexagons that generate a four-way modular array that allows the user to create random accommodations. All parts are produced from three sheets of 15mm MDF, taking the maximum advantage of the material. no screws are needed for assembly, making it ideal for transportation and manipulation.
Furniture dimensions don't come out of the air. They come out of heavy research that, thankfully, a lot of people have already done for us and written books on; if you're a designer, you ought have a copy of one of these books (see bottom of this entry). While these reference bibles of human dimensions haven't yet been updated to account for us supersized Americans, they still provide a good jumping-off point for determining rough dimensions, angles and heights.
American designer Marc Thorpe reveals which vegetable influenced his Husk chair for Moroso in our next exclusive movie for the Italian furniture brand.
How can design impact the largest number of people in a positive way? It’s a question Tim Brown, CEO of global design firm IDEO asks regularly. Businesses are not just machines and companies — from design to traditional industries — have to start thinking differently, Brown said.
The last chair designed by late Danish cabinetmaker Frits Henningsen has been put back into production by furniture company Carl Hansen & Søn. The 1952 Signature Chair features a single curved piece that forms the seat and back. The furniture's sinuous forms are echoed in a gently bent wooden framework with tapering U-shaped legs. The top of the chair folds in slightly to create winged sections around the sitter.
His forward-thinking, futuristic designs have been well-documented on Design Milkand now the multi-hyphenated designer Karim Rashid lets us into his workspace to get a sense of not only where he works, but his process. His colorful wares dot his office surroundings letting him and his staff live with the designs giving better perspective on future ideas.
MIXI Modular allows designers to configure their own designs from a variety of carefully considered shapes, shelving and storage options, including negative space. Each piece made is finely crafted and finished. Fringe Studio incorporates a wide range of materials and, for now at least, doesn’t hesitate to explore other material options in the design process.
What critics are calling a "War on Christmas" is actually just a small skirmish in the ongoing war on shitty design.
How two designers from the 20th century influenced and predicted the way people would live in the 21st century.
Currently the subject of a major retrospective at London’s Barbican Center, the husband-and-wife team helped democratize design, which they saw as an avenue to solve problems rather than a luxury. The exhibition includes numerous versions of the classic leather lounge chair (which Herman Miller now sells for $5,000, countering the Eames model of producing low-cost furniture for the masses) for which they are best known. The influence of that chair can still be seen today in offices and airports around the world, as well as the furniture sold at Target or Ikea. Even Apple’s chief designer Jonathan Ive has named the Eames as an influence for their blend of form and function.
In 1971 Victor Papanek wrote his seminal Design for the Real World, a book I'm hoping is still required reading for modern-day design students. (Sample quote: "Much recent design has satisfied only evanescent wants and desires, while the genuine needs of man have often been neglected by the designer." Still valid today, yeah?)
3M is highly regarded for its research and development in the fields of science and technology. the global innovation company stands to bring forth solutions to simplify and enhance our daily lifestyles, whose success would not exist without a commitment to developing products that have a deep emotional impact on users. 3M is focused on building a holistic approach to design that is inclusive of product, brand, graphic and interactive facets, with the purpose of transforming even the simplest of solutions into objects of desire.
