The Working Space
TWS - Orgatec 2022 Photo/Video Album

A quick walk thru of Orgatec 2022.

TWS - Orgatec 2022 Photo/Video Album
Manufacturer, NeoCon 2021
Source: CFN News Desk
Hightower wins multiple NeoCon awards including ...

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.

Hightower wins multiple NeoCon awards including ‘Best Showroom’
Manufacturer, People
Source: CFN News Desk
Humanscale Announces Elizabeth Margles as Chief ...

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.

Humanscale Announces Elizabeth Margles as Chief Marketing Officer
Manufacturer
Source: CFN News Desk
Steelcase teams up with Kontrol Technologies to ...

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.

Steelcase teams up with Kontrol Technologies to provide air quality monitoring and viral detection technology
Manufacturer, People
Source: CFN News Desk
Alan Jay Heller dies at 81

For over 50 years, Heller offered leading designers the opportunity to work with new technologies to create innovative products. Those were great partnerships and they resulted in great products.

Alan Jay Heller dies at 81

Other Stuff

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3 Reasons Why Competitive Advantage is Dead

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3 Reasons Why Competitive Advantage is Dead

It might be time to re-write the textbook--competitive advantage is on the way out.

As anyone who attended business school learned, competitive advantage is measured by the extent a company produces more products than competitors in its industry, such as if a software company makes more money than another software company. But according to Rita McGrath, a professor at the Columbia Business School, competitive advantage as we know it doesn't exist anymore. It's all part of the future of work and the changing face of where and how business operate.

There are a lot of factors that contributed to this change, but here are three of the biggest players.

Via inc.com >

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Girls Garage

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Girls Garage

Close your eyes and imagine that you are attending a shop class and were being taught how to weld. Welding is a mechanical, hands on, knowledge based activity. You need to pay close and careful attention to your teacher as they describe the methods used while welding. After the teacher skillfully shows you how to complete a perfect stringer bead weld, and all of the safety measures you need to take, they hand you the welder. It’s your turn and so the teacher asks you to try.

Open your eyes. Who was your teacher? Was the person whom you imagined a woman? How about a 9 year old girl? The answer is most likely, “no”, which is precisely why our good friend Emily Pilloton founded Girls Garage – to break gender gaps and bust through stereotypes that girls don’t ‘make’ or ‘build’.

Read the blog post on oneworkplace.com >

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Forget Blueprints—For The Young Architects Of Tomorrow, It's All About "Minecraft"

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Forget Blueprints—For The Young Architects Of Tomorrow, It's All About "Minecraft"

Six-year-old Olive Sáenz has been "obsessed" with Minecraft for about a year, says her mother, Andrea Sáenz. "She spends hours building stuff, blowing stuff up, and building stuff again. She’s been pretty amazing at self-teaching."

But until this past summer, the video game was a solo experience for Olive, who is just now learning to read. Because she wasn’t able to communicate with other players she instead spent hours watching Stampy Cat’s popular YouTube videos, which serve as a Minecraft "how to" for beginners, and putting her own spin on challenges like constructing a roller coaster.

Read the article on fastcompany.com >

‘A chair is only finished when someone sits in it’ and other things we learned from Now I Sit Me Down

‘A chair is only finished when someone sits in it’ and other things we learned from Now I Sit Me Down

A contemplative – and relaxing – look at one of the most underappreciated parts of daily life, the eminent architecture and design writer Witold Rybczynski focuses on the humble (and sometimes not-so-humble) chair in his latest book. Here are your takeaways.

Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair – A Natural History
By Witold Rybczynski
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
256 pp; $28.99

Read more on nationalpost.com >

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In Stata Center phone booths, "light-therapy" aims to brighten moods

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In Stata Center phone booths, "light-therapy" aims to brighten moods

It may be sweltering for most of July and August, with long lingering days, but when winter comes, with its shortness of sunlight, MIT will be ready. 

In fall 2015, Ariel Anders, a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), applied for and received a MindHandHeart Innovation Fund grant to install light-therapy lamps in accessible areas at MIT as a way to combat seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a type of depression that occurs at a certain time each year, usually in the fall or winter.

Read the article on news.mit.edu >

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Forever young: Kinder Modern and Gallery Diet explore children's design

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Forever young: Kinder Modern and Gallery Diet explore children's design

Small people need small chairs. Children’s furniture and design has always been an area of interest for the greats, as well as their storied or private clients; but the world of diminutive design isn’t just taking adult-size thinking and shrinking it down.

'Great child design is inspired by the needs of children; there is [a] way in which children use their bodies with furniture that adults do not even think of,' says Lora Appleton of Kinder Modern. The expertly curated gallery of 20th and 21st century children’s design has paired up with Miami’s Gallery Diet for 'Wrap Your Arms Around Me', a new exhibition running until 1 September. Children are 'physically smaller than us, playful but also in need of parameters or guidance', Appleton explains. 'The show is specifically a reference to this duality.'

Read the article on wallpaper.com >

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Beautifully Restored George Nelson Home Includes Original Furniture for $450K

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Beautifully Restored George Nelson Home Includes Original Furniture for $450K

This dream house by architect and American Modernist designer George Nelson in Kalamazoo, Michigan, could not have come back on the market at a better time. Arriving just in time for Curbed’s Furniture Week, the four-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot home was designed in 1955 for James and Sally Kirkpatrick, whose college roommate Frances Hollister happened to be married to George Nelson—Herman Miller’s longtime director of design.

Read the article on curbed.com >

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Why Making Is Essential to Learning

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Why Making Is Essential to Learning

Making is as old as learning itself. While the maker movement may only be about a decade old, the human desire to create dates back to the earliest forms of human activity, from making stone tools to drawing on cave walls (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014; Martinez & Stager, 2014). Thinkers such as Pestalozzi, Montessori, and Papert helped paved the way for the maker movement by stressing the importance of hands-on, student-centered, meaningful learning. Instead of viewing learning as the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, these thinkers embraced the idea that children learn best when encouraged to discover, play, and experiment.

Read the article on edutopia.org >

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The 5 Biggest Furniture Recalls In U.S. History (And How Ikea Compares)

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The 5 Biggest Furniture Recalls In U.S. History (And How Ikea Compares)

After news leaked that they would be recalling up to 29 million chests and drawers in the wake of the third child death in three years, Ikea USA president Lars Petersson described the recall as "unprecedented" in the company's history. But the massive recall wasn't just unprecedented for Ikea: It marks the largest furniture safety recall in American history, according to data provided to Co.Design by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC).

In fact, looking at the top five furniture recalls in American history, it's not even close. The Ikea recall is three times bigger than the second largest recall in the CSPC's archives—and that recall was spread across an entire industry. Yet a look at the largest furniture recalls in U.S. history reveals that the last two decades have seen plenty of other large-scale recalls, if not quite as huge as Ikea's. Trigger alert: This list is likely to give new parents panic attacks.

Read the story on fastcodesign.com >

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Flexible Workspaces: Glossary of Terms

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Flexible Workspaces: Glossary of Terms

Officing Today realized there was an opportunity to fill a gap in the industry: there wasn’t any place were you could go and find a definition or explanation of terms that are often used in relation to flexible workspaces. Link and you will find a a glossary of terms. It’s still a work in progress so please feel free to make any suggestions and additions you’d like to see.

Read the glossary of terms on officingtoday.com >

Your Chief Design Officer Is Not A Savior

Your Chief Design Officer Is Not A Savior

Doubts about the business value of design are evaporating. Look at investments companies ranging from Google to GE have sunk into design. But methodologies on how to measure and improve design's effectiveness are virtually nonexistent. To close that gap, we created the Design Maturity Survey, a tool that helps organizations evaluate their design maturity and, in doing so, devise strategies to strengthen the impact of design across the organization.

Read the article on fastcodesign.com >

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Space-Saving Furniture Concepts You Can Actually Build: How Häfele's Hardware Delivers "More Life per Square Meter"

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Space-Saving Furniture Concepts You Can Actually Build: How Häfele's Hardware Delivers "More Life per Square Meter"

In Häfele's world, furniture and interior spaces are magic. Cabinet doors swing upwards and out of the way, drawers close themselves, surfaces appear where none were before, objects of one utility transform into objects of another. However, the company is not a furniture manufacturer, but a world leader in architectural and cabinet hardware and fittings—and the nature of their products actually provides a tricky problem for presenting at trade shows like Holz-Handwerk. 

Read the article on core77.com >

Out with Tech, in with Whiskey at Merchandise Mart

Out with Tech, in with Whiskey at Merchandise Mart

Though it won't happen soon enough (for NeoCon that is), Big Whiskey is coming to the Merchandise Mart this spring. NeoCon parties in 2017 could get even better. Beginning in September, premium spirits company Beam Suntory will gradually move its 450-plus employees and global headquarters from Deerfield, Illinois to Chicago's Merchandise Mart, making it the latest company to pull up stakes in the 'burbs in hopes of attracting a young diverse workforce in the city. Beam Suntory signed a letter intent to sublease 110,000 square feet of office space from Motorola Mobility within the Mart, executives announced Monday.

Read the full article on chicagotribune.com >

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Getting the chair: how cinematic villains' seats illuminate character

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Getting the chair: how cinematic villains' seats illuminate character

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.

Read the article on archinect.com > 

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Customizing the Interiors of 2019's Gulfstream G600 Jet

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Customizing the Interiors of 2019's Gulfstream G600 Jet

For many, private flying exists as an aspirational dream—one without lines or shoe removal or cramped seating. A bulk of this travel, in reality, stands as a tool for businesses that require their employees to hop across the globe frequently. Beyond the lack of queues at terminals, there are plenty of inherent benefits—from a much less challenging level of pressurization to substantial space for moving about, sleeping or getting work done. The leader in private aviation, Gulfstream, excels at all of the above and their extensive research and development division envisions further nuances while their manufacturing department produces the fastest long-distance planes. The company has two new jets in development for release in 2018 and 2019, and we took a Gulfstream G550 down to their headquarters in Savannah, Georgia; first, to experience the flight and second, to learn about their plentiful interior design options. It makes sense that planes best-known for their refined flying experiences would dedicate just as much thought to its visual appeal.

Read the article on coolhunting.com >

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ADP Workforce Vitality Index Climbs in Q4 2015

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ADP Workforce Vitality Index Climbs in Q4 2015

Today, payroll-processing firm ADP released its quarterly Workforce Vitality Index (WVI), which reflects wage growth for the fourth quarter of 2015. The index rose to 106.8 during the quarter, up from 105.2 in the previous quarter and 104.2 in the second quarter. The WVI grew by 4 percent from the year-earlier period.

Read the article on architectmagazine.com >

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