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.
Given the ubiquity of digital connectivity, I would expect place itself to change tangibly, along with how we perceive and use it. Spatial changes appear to lag changes in our use and perception, however. This conforms to tech guru John Seely Brown’s contention that it takes a generation for a major technology innovation’s impact to be fully felt.
From exoskeletons to augmented reality goggles, wearable tech is coming to construction sites – and helping to improve safety, efficiency and morale.
The wearable tech market is booming, with production set to hit 135 million in 2018. Smart and constantly connected, wearables include devices such as fitness trackers, smartwatches, and health monitors, with more functions emerging all the time.
In today’s day and age, technology allows for more interconnectivity than ever. Wi-Fi is available nearly everywhere, whether we are sitting in a coffee shop or aboard an airplane. We can remotely monitor our homes camera systems, and change the thermostat while away. We can even have face-to-face chats with family members across the ocean with a touch of a button. So why, with all of the modern technology available today, do we still have so many technology issues in the corporate setting? Why does IT staff need to be involved almost every time you want to start a meeting and use video conferencing or online collaboration tools? Why do our corporate systems “go down” at the worst times? Why do we need to call IT to make sure the tech in the boardroom is working and set up before you enter the meeting?
James Ludwig is vice president, global design and product engineering for Steelcase. 360 recently sat down with James for a two-part discussion on the impact technology is making in the workplace, the kinds of tensions it’s creating for people, how workplace design can help and what we may see in the future of work. Part 1 is all about you — how Smart + Connected Spaces can improve people’s experiences at work.
Swedish software company Configura’s biannual Partner Meeting and Developer Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, earlier this month brought “the doers and the decision-makers” together to chart the ongoing course for the CET Designer software platform.
At first glance the Print the Future shop in midtown Manhattan looks much like any other sleek designer homeware store. Look closer, however, and you’ll notice that the geometric stools, chunky chairs, and curvaceous settee have something rather unusual in common. They’ve all been 3D printed by a machine like the one currently whirring away in the back of the room as it makes a bright blue stool to add to this stylish display.
Steelcase and Microsoft have come together for the first time to help organizations enable and facilitate more creative work from their teams in an increasingly competitive business landscape. By providing workers with a thoughtfully designed workplace — one that brings together space and technology — business leaders can unlock the creativity of people, inspiring ideas and accelerating innovation along the way.
“Everyone who is a leader of a company is trying to figure out how to unlock people’s potential,” said James Ludwig, vice president of global design for Steelcase. Ludwig joined Ralf Groene, general manager of device design at Microsoft, for a panel discussion ahead of the New York Times’ 2017 New Work Summit about how leaders can harness the creativity of their people and their organizations.The moderated discussion sponsored by Steelcase took place on the same day Microsoft and Steelcase announced a new partnership to support creativity in the workplace.
Google’s delivering on its promise of keeping its interactive whiteboard under $6,000. Priced at $4,999, the Jamboard is just a hair more expensive than the 55-inch version of Cisco’s Sparkboard and considerably less so than the $8,999 Surface Hub, which was both the first of the trio to be announced and first to market when it started shipping last March.
Google’s 55-inch offering is set to arrive May. That price includes two styli and one eraser. What it doesn’t factor in, however, is upkeep. The management and support fee is going to cost your IT department an additional $600 a year – though that price will be halved if they manage to get in before the end of September. And hey, the company will throw in a free wall mount too, for good measure.
Growth and innovation are top of mind issues when I speak with business leaders around the world. One of those conversations included Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella. Three years ago, we were both new to our roles and facing a similar challenge: shifting priorities from efficiency to growth. This kind of change not only requires a reallocation of resources — it necessitates a change in culture and a new way of leading. At my first meeting with our management, I quoted Satya challenging Microsoft to recognize innovation and foster its growth. I thought his words reflected a unique perspective on the emergent nature of true innovation and the evolving role of leadership to fuel creativity.
When Satya and I later talked, we recognized the customers we served were facing the same hurdles around innovation and creativity. So, we asked our teams to think about how our companies could work together to be more helpful to those facing this challenge.
Configura, maker of CET Designer space-planning software, has signed Sunon – the largest office furniture manufacturer in China – as a partner. Sunon is investing in a CET Designer Extension in order to simplify its sales and order process and expand into new global markets.
We live in a changing world shaped by technology. From Uber to the iPhone, better technology has made our lives easier and made us more connected. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the modern office. Workers enabled by mobile devices are no longer required to come into the office to do work. Videoconferencing makes even remote collaboration possible, for example. As a response we’ve seen work layouts change to reflect the new way that work is done. Desks may no longer be assigned, and employee to desk ratios are decreasing. It’s made the open office concept possible.
Khameleon Software has added Haworth Web Services Integration to its software. This integration gives office furniture dealers a direct line to Haworth when it comes to requesting pricing, ordering, and receiving acknowledgements. The integration is designed to help save dealers hours of work and reduce the risk of error. It’s a highly anticipated announcement that comes after months of close collaboration with Haworth and Haworth dealers.
IA’s Design Intelligence group researches, adapts, and creates new technologies for our clients and design teams to best implement design and change. The group has explored workflows from Automated Programming to Virtual Reality, but what is it doing now, and what can we expect from design technologies for interior architecture in the near future?
Shifting digital dynamics are reshaping the way organisations operate and are recasting the traditional route to business success, claims new research into the rise of the digital workplace. Ricoh’s new report into digital workplace trends produced in partnership with polling company Censuswide, argues that the latest technology strategies are rendered useless without proper commitment to skills training and the empowerment of those workers who will be making use of it. It advises that businesses need to work on improving the workforce’s digital dexterity by creating an office culture fit for sharing ideas and skills across social, video and digital platforms. The report identifies digital skills training as a key differentiator for employees seeking a new job. Over a third of UK office workers (37 per cent) say they would move jobs to a company which offered better digital skills in the workplace. Likewise a modest 18 per cent of respondents rated their skills as ‘excellent’ whilst 51 per cent said ‘good’ and 30 per cent considered themselves ‘average.’
Amazon has taken the wraps off of its own Skype competitor. Chime is a new video conferencing and communications from AWS that’s focused on business users.
Beyond VoIP calling and video messaging, Chime includes virtual meetings, allowing users to host or join a remote meeting through the service. Pricing starts at $2.50 per user per month on the lowest end, with a higher tier plan of $15 per user which includes video and screen-sharing among other features. There is a basic option available for free but that is limited to video calls and chat rooms between two users.
Chime is available for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android devices.
The move is not only an alternative to communication services like Skype for business or Google Hangouts, but it is also takes AWS into the space of virtual meeting management, where companies like GoToMeeting and Cisco (WebEx) are the best known players.
It’s no surprise to say that technology is having a significant impact on the workplace and the use of corporate real estate. The fast pace of change has seen technology impact all aspects of business, government and culture, as well as personal life, with a constant flow of new innovations and solutions helping us to do things more quickly and efficiently. Equally, technology also provides a challenge to business and, more specifically, corporate operations, with a whole array of disruptive technologies. Disruption is indeed now running a swathe through a whole spectrum of industries. CoreNet Global’s recent report, The Bigger Picture: The Future of Corporate Real Estate, attempts to capture the impact of technological change, and a variety of other factors, that will influence, disrupt and transform the corporate real estate (CRE) profession. As business strategy and operations are reshaped and consumer preferences change, we will find that the ‘how’ and ‘where’ people want to work will transform.
Many people who design things for a living are familiar with software configuration tools that work with libraries of objects that graphically come together according to rules. The results might be a walk-through model of a building, a modular office system, or a fantasy world like what everyone under 20 knows about, thanks to Minecraft. ICE from DIRTT Environmental Systems is different: this tool is both disruptive and catalyzing, and it’s just beginning to penetrate the construction market.
There are other software configurator tools that will spit-out a bill of materials, but this ICE software is many levels deep, managing the middle office (logistics, labor rates, etc.), all the way to manufacturing (production queues, shipping). It's the most exciting software platform in the building materials industry I have seen, blending a conventional-enough looking sales tool with enterprise software.
The enterprise cloud software industry can point to 2016 as yet another year of noteworthy growth. The 31 cloud software companies that are publicly held reported annual revenue increases of almost 25 percent, saw their combined share valuations grow over 30 percent and their market caps hit more than $1 billion.
Following on the heels of an impressive 2016, what does 2017 have in store for the industry? The partners at Emergence Capital offer the following predictions around the forces that will drive the enterprise software space during this New Year.
