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.
A conventional approach to product development yields conventional results. To discover true innovation requires a fresh point of view and a willingness to take a different path. KI’s Ruckus Collection defies convention in every way, beginning with its design process.
When you think of HON, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Maybe it’s our task seating. Maybe you know HON from the old days where our strongest suit was steel filing. Or, perhaps you are familiar with how we got started making recipe card boxes post World War II. If education furniture wasn’t something that popped into your head, you might be surprised to hear that HON has a very robust collection of learning solutions – a perfect example of our inspired practicality story. Take a look below at some of the ways HON has the right products for every space, every student and every type of learning.
Today, the number of international students are increasing, and their expectations for academic living are not limited to the four walls of the bedroom. They desire a higher quality of hospitality. They want a space to meet people, collaborate, learn and play, spaces that will enhance the social living experience to support and improve academic and personal growth.
Happiness is essential to positive mental health—and crucial to student safety and wellbeing on campus. As such, achieving happiness should be integral to the master planning process to improve the campus experience for students, faculty, and visitors.
Whether we are talking about a building’s entrance, or the walkways between activity zones in an open-plan environment, an effective transitional space can be described as a circulatory route. Whether located between indoor and outdoor environments or between different zones within a space, they act as a buffer and a physical link between individual areas.
Designing flexible spaces in schools is not a new concept. The majority of newly constructed or renovated schools opening in 2017 will tout flexible learning spaces for students and staff. Incorporating flexible solutions is due to the ever evolving demand of students who want the ability to shape and reshape their learning environment to meet their needs of the day.
In large lecture halls and auditoria, it is crucial to understand from the beginning how active the learning will be, and what combinations of activity may occur. It is fairly common at the start of a project for institutions to request extensive adaptability and flexibility.
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."
