Entries Written By Mark Eltringham
Building a thriving culture in the new work landscape
The transformation of our working lives continues to offer a unique opportunity to step back and reassess how we work. One facet of the workplace that is just as important as technology but probably less talked about is culture. As well as being inherently a good thing to do for people, the creation of a company …
We experience colours and everything else in our own unique ways
Imagine a world in which every sound you hear is accompanied by a colour. For one woman named only as VA in a new study, this is her everyday reality. She has a rare condition called phoneme-colour synaesthesia, which means that she experiences a synesthetic connection between the sounds of speech and colours. For instance, …
in News, Workplace Design
Introducing Peach Fuzz: Pantone’s Color of the Year 2024
Pantone has unveiled Peach Fuzz as its Color of the Year 2024, a soft and welcoming shade that embodies warmth, compassion, and a sense of connection. The colour trends spotters at pantone say that the velvety peach tone reflects our desire for intimacy and togetherness, while also acknowledging the simple pleasures of solitude and self-care. …
Hybrid working and the other legacies of lockdown, three years on
It’s now three years since the world was hit with the full force of COVID-19 and went into lockdown. So what better time to take stock on the legacy of that period on the way we work and the way we design spaces to accommodate work? Underlying these changes is a general shift towards flexible …
in News, Workplace Design
Germany’s secondary cities drive demand for flexible workspace
Demand for flexible workspace continues to grow across Germany, up 47 percent year-on-year, following an ongoing shift to agile working practices, according to The Instant Group’s newly released German Flexible Market Review. The rapid increase in demand in the flexible office market is being driven by Hanover, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart and Leipzig. Leipzig, located an …
in News, Workplace Design
An unconventional pink is the perfect colour for changing times and is Pantone Colour of the Year 2023
A colour described by the Pantone Institute as “an unconventional red for an unconventional time”, has been named as the trend forecaster’s colour of the year for 2023. Viva Magenta, or more prosaically Pantone 18-1750, is a vivid pink with purplish undertones, described by Laurie Pressman of the Institute as “assertive but not aggressive … …
People often feel too busy to move around enough at work – but there are solutions
A large proportion of workers feel they have too much work to be able to move around during the working day, with chronic stress and anxiety becoming increasingly prevalent, according to a new report supported by CIMSPA (The Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity). Despite growing health issues linked with consistently …
Forget the future of work and instead focus on its futures
Over recent months I’ve had a lot of conversations with organisations about their workplace plans and strategies as they plan for their own future of work. And I’ve listened in on even more conversations. One notion that is constantly expressed by the people developing such strategies is that they are very uncertain about both the …
Changing our perceptions of colour and office design
Strange as it may seem, there are some colours that the human eye can’t see and it’s not just because they exist outside the usual spectrum. Compared to many other animals, the typical human eye is only capable of perceiving light across a narrow band of wavelengths of somewhere between 390 and 750 nanometers. That …
in News, Workplace Design
The studied carelessness of agile workplaces
In recent years we have grown very fond of borrowing foreign words to describe some of the more difficult to express ideas about wellbeing and work. We’ve adopted Eudaimonia from the Ancient Greek of Aristotle to describe the nuances of wellbeing, happiness and purpose. We went nuts briefly for the Scandinavian idea of hygge to …
