Entries Written By Mark Eltringham
Getting the right balance – we shape our environment and it shapes us
It is a universal truth to say that humans are the products of their environments. That is why we enjoy such physical, social and cultural diversity. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once famously wrote ‘I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself’. …
The elements of wellbeing are eternal, wherever we work
Many people appear to have been somewhat taken aback by the success of the large-scale shift to remote working of the past two years, and its impact on our productivity and wellbeing. But they shouldn’t have been.
Not busy-ness as usual: how boredom may be one of the keys to creativity
The modern world seems geared to help us avoid boredom. But there’s a problem. Artists have long recognised that boredom can drive creativity.
in News, Workplace Design
Remote work highlights the value of weak ties
Something we can expect to hear a lot about in the near future is the power of weak ties. It’s a well-established idea in sociology, anthropology, and social network analysis theory. But it’s about to be invigorated as a way of thinking about workplaces and working culture in the wake of two major peer-reviewed studies …
in News, Workplace Design
Getting collaboration just right will be the new focus for both digital and physical work places
We should be careful not to read too much into the results of the ongoing Great Workplace Experiment, if only because it is happening under very peculiar conditions. We’ll only really understand it in retrospect and what we’ll probably conclude is that it taught us things we already knew (more or less) about humans, their …
Knowing when to lie flat in the new era of hybrid working
When people first started working from home in large numbers for the first time in the Spring of 2020, one of the most talked about issues was how the productivity of most stayed the same or improved. This shouldn’t have been that surprising given all that we have learned about remote and flexible working over …
The pivotal role of Sedus in the history of workplace ergonomics and wellbeing
The roots of our 21st Century approach to ergonomics lie in a small town called Waldshut, which sits at the southern tip of the Black Forest, on the North bank of the Rhine where it forms a natural border between Germany and Switzerland. It was here nearly one hundred years ago that Sedus first introduced …
Wellbeing and ergonomics are just as important for those working from home
The use of the term ‘ergonomic’ to describe the design of objects is useful but it doesn’t really tell the whole story. Ergonomics is about the relationship between a person and the things around them. It’s an abstract idea, weaving together the disparate strands of context and usage. And when those strands change, what we …
The importance of indoor air quality at work
One of the unintended consequences of the pandemic has been to focus attention on the issue of indoor air quality. But as Sarah Zhang points out in a recent piece in The Atlantic, this is an issue that we have long understood, and not just as a way to reduce the risks of infection. It …
in News, Workplace Design
Ethical behaviour and better ideas are linked to great office design
We’ve reported before on What’s Up about the important role of office design in nurturing individual wellbeing and bringing people together to collaborate. However, sophisticated the collaborative technology we have at our disposal, it always turns out that certain behaviours and ideas can best (and sometimes only) be nurtured in physical space.
