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.
They say the world’s oldest profession is prostitution but the world’s oldest industry is almost certainly real estate. From staving off territorial land in the era of the cavemen, to fighting over prime office space in modern day cities, workspace has been of crucial importance to anyone in the business of making money.
Dr. Marie Puybaraud, global head of research for JLL, explores how we can embrace robots in the workplace and compensate for the inevitable lack of face-to-face interaction. Today, our industry is contemplating how it will embrace the cyber world and compensate for the inevitable lack of face-to-face interaction. How would we feel stepping in to an office managed solely by robots? How do you feel about staying at a hotel where 90 percent of the staff is automated?
Senior Interior Designer, Bradley Schott from dwpIsuters, explores the value of flooring in communicating health informatics as with their recent project, The Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI), Macquarie University.
Imagine Hannibal Lecter in a lawn chair: not quite as menacing, right? While furniture in film can be a subtle part of the mise-en-scene, for cinematic villains, their signature chair often defines their character, even if that character is rotten right down to the studs. What chairs do the best job of bringing out the worst of an empire-crazed nihilist, or a serial killer, or a limelit psychopath? To answer that question, we had these ten evildoers take a seat according to their preferred vice.
You don’t have to look very far to find somebody or other proclaiming the death of the office. A quick Google search will come up with over 73 million results for the past year alone. This has been going on for decades, but a search engine now gives us a far better idea than the occasional feature in a trade magazine of just how the idea has evolved into a full-blown meme. The narrative has become so entrenched that the people who use it – typically the ignorant, the self-interested, the lazy and the ill-informed – rarely have their premise challenged. Usually it is an idea appended to some disruptive and supposedly apocalyptic trend and, at the moment, office kryptonite comes in the form of coworking, where once it was flexible working or mobile technology. And yet, for all the non-fatal wounds these innovations have inflicted on the traditional office, the idea of people travelling to work alongside each other in shared buildings endures.
Five years ago, in 2011, the first wave of the oldest U.S. baby boomers reached the common retirement age of 65. Since then, another 10,000 each day continue to reach this stage in their lives. The U.S. Census Bureau calculates that by 2020, 55.9 million people in the U.S. will be age 65 or older, and by 2030, that number will reach 72.7 million.
Most organizations say they are more open-minded than ever about virtual teams, and yet they still have old-school systems in place for hiring people across the country or around the world. From where I sit, the overlapping barriers come down to structure, culture, and mindset.
Customized facilities—from mega data storage centers to trading floors and call centers—let clients strategize and choose the appropriate level of performance and security they demand.
Organizations constantly monitor how they can improve their daily business operations to increase work productivity and employee satisfaction. One kind of low-hanging fruit they might be missing is meetings. More than 30 percent of all scheduled meetings don’t happen at all in today's workplace. Data from many of our customers showed that 15 percent of meetings were still reserved by employees who were no longer at the company!
Technology has made travel agents irrelevant, killed off record and video stores and rendered paper maps obsolete. Now it’s taking aim at your office.
As the IoT continues to become more prevalent, soon it will enter into the workplace also. This will provide offices with many different benefits, but also things to be cautious of.
Three quarters of companies worldwide have now introduced flexible working to enable employees to vary their hours and work from home or on the move according to one of the largest global surveys of its kind conducted with 8,000 employers and employees across three continents. The Flexible: friend or foe? survey was commissioned by Vodafone and took place between September and October 2015. The countries surveyed were Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the USA. A total of 8,000 employers and employees were interviewed online. The rapid adoption of high-speed mobile data services, fixed-line broadband and cloud services is playing an integral role in this workplace revolution: 61 percent of respondents now use their home broadband service to access work applications and 24 percent use a mobile data connection via their smartphone, tablet or laptop with a broadband dongle.
With the growth of the internet and mobile and its continued integration into our daily lives, society has moved its work channels from the physical to the digital, erasing the lines between work and life in the process. And with it, perhaps we have created a unique problem: We are trapped between the demands of the nontraditional and traditional office space.
US and European office markets will tighten further in 2016 as demand for space outpaces a limited number of new developments, according to CBRE Group’s 2016 Global Real Estate Market Outlook. However, the extent of tightening in individual cities will depend strongly on local job growth in major office-using industries. Global prime rents across the three major property types—office, industrial and retail—are expected to grow 2.2 percent on an annual basis, according to estimates from CBRE’s Global Rent Index. The Americas, thanks to the strength of the US property sector, is expected to see commercial real estate rents rise 3.4 percent in 2016, as consumption growth and rising employment, combined with comparatively limited new supply levels, simulates demand. Rents in EMEA are forecast to rise by 3.2 percent thanks to a combination of increased consumer spending, pent-up demand for commercial space and anticipated further monetary easing by the European Central Bank.
The future office must also cater for workers from four generations - Millennials, Generations X and Y, and Baby Boomers in senior management. What drives productivity amongst one group may not necessarily work for another. So already we are seeing the development of workspaces that can shift and adapt to changing requirements.
Atlassian’s infographic shows that the average employee spends 31 hours a month in meetings and considers at least 50% of them a complete waste of time. 91% daydream, 75% do other work, and 39% sleep during at least some of them. And unnecessary meetings waste $37 billion a year.
In my previous life, I spent a lot of time in corporate offices that were just not good. Good, I suppose, in the sense that showing up resulted in a paycheck every two weeks; but not good for mental or physical health. Endless cubicles, no sunlight, low engagement, little sense of purpose, and chicken fried steak in the cafeteria. Seriously! Chicken fried steak. Convinced that our best selves shouldn’t be left waiting for us out in the parking lot while we punched the clock every day, I became passionate about creating a workspace where you are better off when you leave than when you came in.
Dining rooms today seem louder than ever, boasting all the acoustics of a shipping container. We turned to local designers for an explanation and determined that the problem is multifaceted, rooted in design trends, dining preferences, and economic conditions.
Immersive virtual reality (VR) has become a significant part of IA’s workflow in the delivery of interior architecture. This method of informing designers, clients, builders, and consultants about the human experience of a project—before it is built—has resulted in some of the most impressive uses for building information modeling (BIM). In 2015, we used VR particularly to connect multiple stakeholders on a project. But what if we could do even more through VR? What if we take existing workflows and place them in immersive environments? As an extension of our 2015 VR work, this is an application that IA is currently pursuing.
When it comes to workplace, small companies and big ones have more in common than you think. I’ve spoken with 20 person startups who are asking themselves the same questions: What does the future work space need to look like to best engage employees?”
