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.
Technological advances mean that staff can avoid the drudgery of commuting and work from home, coffee shops, or any number of exotic locations. So some companies are working extra-hard to make their offices more attractive places to be.
Picture yourself at the office in 2021, five short years from now. An app on your smartphone reserves your favorite cubbyhole—you don’t have a fixed desk. You settle in, using a different app to set the lighting and temperature to your liking, and play your favorite background music. A colleague comes by with a question, so you wirelessly connect your laptop to a nearby whiteboard to share a presentation. Far-fetched? Not for some corporations. Offices are evolving faster than at any time in history, and becoming more accommodating of individual choice.
How a brain scientist collaborates with NBBJ to uncover our perceptions of designed space.
According to research from Flexjobs, telecommuting has grown 103 percent since 2005 and approximately eighty to ninety percent of the workforce would like to telework at least part-time. Work-life balance (81 percent), family (56 percent), time savings (56 percent), and commute stress (48 percent) are the top reasons people seek flexible work arrangements. Millennials would put flexible working ahead of professional development training, company reputation and a sense of purpose when looking for a job. FlexJobs recently analysed the remote job listings of over 40,000 companies to determine which companies have been recruiting for the most telecommuting positions in recent months. Healthcare, technology and education were the most well-represented industries. The remote job listings at these companies are equally diverse, such as business analyst, product manager, developer, teacher, director of communications and market researcher.
Seventy percent of U.S. office workers and managers report working more than 40 hours a week, and the majority consider the office the most productive place to get work done. But employers need to take action to ensure it remains an inspiring, motivating environment. This, according to the second annual Workplace Index conducted by Staples Business Advantage, the business-to-business division of Staples, Inc.
An increasing number of employees may be opting for telecommuting and on-demand workspaces, but 66 percent of American employees consider the office as the most productive place to get work done. Thirty-six percent say it’s the most inspiring place to work as well, more than any other location. But as workers spend more time in the office, the onus falls on employers to keep their employees healthy, productive and inspired. According to The Staples Business Advantage Workplace Index, 70 percent of US office workers and managers report working more than 40 hours a week, many of whom say they’re working longer hours simply to catch up on work they couldn’t tackle during an eight hour day. And that workload is taking a toll, with 64 percent of respondents saying their workplace has contributed to stress, nearly half feeling so overworked they’re motivated to look for another job and 13 percent having taken a workplace stress-related leave of absence.
Of all the memes and narratives that corrupt public discourse about workplace design, the most pernicious is the one that suggests there is a linear evolution to some grand end point called the Office of the Future. There is a natural human inclination to buy this sort of idea, fed by an assumption that what we find most interesting, aspirational and hence what we read and talk about forms a goal. Read any style magazine and you’ll see the same process at work in every facet of our lives. This is why so many people are quick to consume and then regurgitate the idea that what we see happening in the world’s great tech palaces and creative offices represents the apogees of design to which the rest of us must one day succumb. It rests on misguided assumptions about what really goes on in such offices and what these assumptions mean for firms in other sectors. It is the great apex fallacy of workplace design and it is one we must constantly challenge.
In the face of a growing number of complex and interconnected global problems, more and more people within the architecture and design community are finding ways to leverage design to make a difference in the world. Alejandro Aravena’s 2016 Pritzker Prize win is a good illustration of the increasing appetite for this kind of approach within the field, and architects around the world are taking up the challenge of designing solutions that address complex issues such as climate change, population growth, rapid urbanization, economic development and human health.
Your life depends on good air. Every year, air pollution causes the premature deaths of between 5.5 million and 7 million people, making it more deadly than HIV, traffic accidents and diabetes combined. The majority of these deaths—about 4 million—are caused by indoor air pollution, primarily in developing countries. But it takes a toll in developed countries as well. In Europe, for example, air pollution shortens the average life expectancy by nearly one year. Worldwide, more than 80 percent of people living in urban areas breathe air that exceeds pollution limits advised by the World Health Organization (WHO).
We live in an ever changing economy. Students and employees joining the work force today, think, work and act differently than past generations. It is our responsibility as designers to create spaces that respond to this younger generation. They are, in fact, future leaders of our nation.
As a firm, DLR Group is fortunate to practice across multiple sectors, including both education and workplace. Our design teams regularly share valuable information on trends and benchmarks that will shape the future of facilities for both user groups. A common theme we see in both settings is the high degree of flexibility day to day and adaptability year to year. And three kinds of specific spaces are emerging as the appropriate support for the day to day activities of the creative economy: gathering spaces that support synergies among many; pods that encourage small group interactions; and huddle spaces that foster one on one dialogue.
Open-office plans have been bashed by critics, but done right, they can be effective. When my company, Namely, moved into a new space, I knew I didn’t want my own office. That’s right -- I’m the CEO, and I don’t have my own office. Instead, I move my desk around every few months so I can sit in a different Namely department.
A big part of our job is re-educating people on their understanding of what Activity Based Working (ABW) really is. And perhaps even more importantly, help create their own definition of what it means for them personally.
We’ve all heard the negative stereotype surrounding Millennials…entitled, lazy, do-gooders who can’t put down their smart phones. We’ve also heard the positive stereotype of this generation….tech-savvy, adaptable employees who look for meaning in their work and openly seek to collaborate with peers. Millennials now make up the largest generation in the workforce, leaving employers scratching their heads as to how to attract and retain these workers who seem to challenge the traditional norms of “work”. KI and HOK set out to answer just this question. After speaking with HR professionals, employers and recent graduates we uncovered one, consistent truth, recently hired graduates are ‘lost in transition’.
Transitioning from a traditional office to an open office environment that fosters collaboration and mobility can be challenging. The Internet is loaded with articles about organizations opening up innovative colorful spaces that have touchdown stations, huddle rooms, phone booths, and even amenities such as coffee bars, office slides, and ping-pong tables. But I am often curious as to whether these offices provide a real connection to the employees versus a trendy design fad that is solely intended to make the workplaces seem cool. It is precisely this deeper connection that design psychology can provide when creating new workplaces.
Research by the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health found that employees in a call center who used standing desks for a six-month period were 46 percent more productive than colleagues who used standard desks.
By now the backlash against the open office — which, by industry definition, includes spaces with cubicles since cubicle walls aren’t permanent, but by popular definition means a space without any high dividers — has reached fever pitch.
The sound of a word like "knife" or "truck" seems totally arbitrary—it’s just a random sound we’ve assigned to a thing, right? But for several decades, scientists have found good evidence that the sound of words have meaning in a very real way. Sound can convey subtle information about traits such as size, shape, smoothness, and also, according to a new study in Cognition, distance. This suggests that while the sound of company and product names—Lyft, Smuckers, Nike—may seem meaningless, it may actually quietly shape consumers' perceptions.
In a further nod to the growing relevance of flexible working, the ability to work anytime, anywhere is now key to job satisfaction with well over a third (38 percent) of employees in a global survey rating this as the number one factor, with the UK (43 percent) scoring this the highest. According to the “Mobility, Performance and Engagement” report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Aruba, employees in Western countries report themselves to be happier in their jobs, more loyal to their employers and more productive in their work compared to their counterparts in Eastern markets. When it comes to securing loyalty, the ability to hot desk was seen as paramount by many employees, notably in Singapore (37 percent), UAE (31 percent) and the US (34 percent), while the ability to collaborate with other employees was the number one choice for employees in Germany (43 percent), France (37 percent) and Japan (35 percent).
If you think the way people work is probably not quite as glossily portrayed in the media, then you’d probably be right. A lot more European workers than is commonly supposed still believe that fax machines are essential business tools, according to a new report from unified communications business Fuze. In a study of the working habits of 5,000 EU employees, it found that the fax machine is considered ‘essential’ by 30 percent of workers in the UK, 39 percent in Germany and 42 percent in France. The report also found that many also think that desktop computers are still more important in their day-to-day working lives that laptops, tablets or smartphones. Anybody horrified by the report’s findings will be heartened by its claim that the machines will die off in time as a new generation of people who don’t know what the hell a fax machine is supplant those who still cling to their battered, old, paper-based devices.
People have been talking about the death of the office for at least a quarter of a century. Leaving aside the often misleading conflation of flexible working with homeworking that is often involved, the underlying premise of such talk has been the same for all of that time. The main argument is, and always was, that there is an alternative to the tedium, aggravation and expense of travelling to an office solely to work inside its hermetically sealed and fluorescent-lit, blue-carpeted interior alongside people who can drive you spare, before you schlep home again. The problem with the argument is that, in spite of its evident drawbacks, office life maintains an attraction for both employers and employees and there will always be an upper limit on how long people want to spend home alone. Things are changing but the death of the office is a myth.
