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.
We talk about how cities and buildings look. We call places landmarks or eyesores. But we rarely talk about how architecture sounds, aside from when a building or room is noisy.
Read the essay on nytimes.com > [paywall]
“What’s our utilization rate?” If you work in corporate real estate, you’ve likely asked or been asked this question. While utilization is an important metric to inform how frequently a space is used, it’s important to consider another key piece of data for strategic planning: activity data.
In Evidence, our column on the science of creativity and visual culture, we try to unpack the subtle ways design shapes human perception and behavior. Consider how color can make you trust an untrustworthy brand, packaging can alter how food tastes, and playful—some might say juvenile—offices may help you achieve personal job goals.
2015 has been a great year for office trends. Many ditched behemoth leather chairs for standing desks (and scored chiseled leg muscles along the way), waved goodbye to real pants in favor of athleisure, and kicked off super-interesting side hustles. Now that we’re right on the verge of 2016, there’s even more to look forward to.
Ah, the open-plan office, that shining example of egalitarian design, the great leveler of the corporate caste system. Just one problem: there’s no privacy. Open-plan offices are distractingly noisy. Their intended purpose is to boost collaboration and productivity, but these designs have actually done quite the opposite. Research shows that open-plan workspaces damage employees’ attention spans, stress levels, short-term memory, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction.
If you haven’t read A Toxic Work World, written by Anne-Marie Slaughter and published by the New York Times, you’ve probably read one of many responses to her position in the Washington Post, Refinery 29, Salon.com, or The Atlantic. In her article, Slaughter argues that part of the challenge facing the American workplace is an increasing competitiveness that is edging out not only traditional caregivers—namely women—but anyone who isn’t “healthy, and wealthy enough not to have to care for family members.” Her argument, which she develops further in her new book Unfinished Business, spans cultural values around gender equity, politics, and global economics.
The future of the workplace. Will we sit across from holograms? Will we teleport from one conference room to another? Will pens, pencils, and paper become obsolete? When envisioning the future of the workplace, there is a tendency to think in extremes. We often link the grand concept of “the future” to the fantastical. While technology is evolving at a rapid pace and integrating itself into all aspects of our lives, there is still something to be said for human collaboration. At the root of how we work are the people with whom we work, and the ideas that come from human contact. Therefore, when envisioning the future, it is important to think of technology as something that can adapt to fit natural human functioning, and not the other way around.
Office interior design trends gradually change from year to year. With 2015 coming to a close, design professionals and experts are steadily drawing up their lists of predictions for the coming year. We spoke to expert Bill Hanley, vice president of strategic partnerships at Kontor, for his take on the office trends that are poised to transform the 2016 workscape.
We all know sitting all day at work is slowly killing us. Now the question is how to design anti-sitting desks that people will actually want to use—and how to get everyone, including kids, using them. In 2015, an elementary school in California became the first in the world to switch to 100% standing desks, while a Danish designer optimized a kid-sized standing desk as a way to transform "sitting culture."
This month, the London School of Economics (LSE) hosted its 10th annual UrbanCities debates, a forum where world leaders in the field of urbanism come together to discuss their views on the subject and its relative disciplines (mainly architecture). This year AN caught up with Design Museum curator Deyan Sujic, Norman Foster, and Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, among others for the debate.
Companies investing in the strategic evolution of their workplaces are often focused on how it can make life better for their people. They recognize that providing a healthy, efficient and fun workplace will help their employees be productive and also help them recruit and retain talent over time. But workplaces aren’t just spaces senior leadership help create and then walk away from. Strategic, smart workplace design can also enrich the work experience for the CEOs and the C-Suite.
You might think that the reams of analysis done on office space would have by now turned every workplace into a humming hive of engagement and productivity. Earlier this year, we even got an advance look at a research paper that outlined alternative design strategies to make workers happier.
What to expect in workplace design in the year ahead.
As we say at Knoll, the one constant we can count on is change. With this in mind, Knoll Inspiration sat down with Tracy Wymer, Vice President of Workplace Research & Strategy at Knoll, to review 2015 and look forward to the year ahead. Read on to learn how co-working culture will influence more traditional workspaces, why what's good for people is good for organizations, and why there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all.
Todd Clippinger of the American Craftsman Workshop on how to keep your creative mind sharp.
Watch the video above or read the article on core77.com >
Technology was suppose to make life simple. Instead, it made it more complex. The solution? Computing without computers.
We have evolved into digitized beasts capable of sending personal statements in a matter of seconds. Whether via images, posts, invites, and tweets, we have the ability to disseminate opinions and ideas — from the half-baked to the fully fledged — in a moment’s notice. We communicate daily with audiences comprised of people we know and some we don’t, and, while many use it to dish out selfies, troll celebs, or express their very public infatuation with a favorite donut shop, I can’t help but consider how harvesting these opinions can (and will) affect the practice of design.
When a CEO plans out a re-design of his or her office, questions of culture surely come to mind. How should the desks and meeting rooms be laid out so as to best reflect the company’s culture? How do you want people to feel when they come to work? If you have a good grip on your ideal company culture, you can help bring that to life in your design.
Most of us inherently know that having “choice” at work is a good thing and that it helps us to be more productive, more creative, more engaged and healthier. When we don’t have control over aspects of our work, we become stressed, we feel trapped, and our performance suffers. But, you may ask, is there any proof that this is true? I mean, maybe we have a general sense that choice is good, but are there studies that prove this out? Turns out, there are.
Read the article on workdesign.com > [paywall]
Leading designers, architects, and product manufacturers enjoyed an invigorating two days at the 11th Annual Contract Design Forum, held in Savannah, Georgia, in early November. The Forum is held each year for experts engaged in commercial architecture and interior design—architects and designers who are principals and design directors of firms—nationally recognized designers of workplace, hospitality, healthcare, retail, education, and civic projects. Design educators and national real estate leaders attended this year as well.
What has become increasingly apparent over recent years is that the office isn’t just a place to work, but also a driver of competitive advantage. We’ve always known this to a greater or lesser extent, but the dynamic and ever shifting nature of the modern world is presenting organisations with new and evolving challenges that they must address with all of the tools at their disposal. At the heart of this complexity is the physical workspace. Its design touches on every aspect of the changing workplace and the objectives organisations set for themselves and their employees. Although it has lots its primacy as the main place of work, you could also argue that the focus on the office’s key strengths makes it more important than ever within the context of overall working cultures. So, with that in mind, here are ten of the most important current trends in workplace design and management we foresee for 2016.
