Entries Written By Mark Eltringham
in News, Workplace Design
Better offices and engineered serendipity will characterise work after lockdown
If you ask people what they want from their offices, they are very likely to describe something more like a café than a traditional office. This has been true for some time and never more so than in this period in which people have been obliged to work out exactly what they want from their …
What Steve Jobs can teach us about the future of work and office design
At the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, Steve Jobs delivered a speech addressing the theme of the conference; The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be. In it he set out his thoughts on new technology, intuitive design, personal computing as well as the need for a constantly evolving idea of what the future …
in News, Workplace Design
Inclusivity should be woven into the culture and fabric of the office
You can tell an awful lot about an organisation just by looking at the workplace it inhabits. These days that means the technological and cultural space as much as the physical office. Traditional office design models and standards can disadvantage certain individuals and make the office all but unusable for others.
in News, Workplace Design
The workplace after lockdown will be an evolution of what we already know
Understandably, we are hearing an awful lot right now about the disruption that the pandemic and lockdown are causing to our lives, and in particular the way we work. While a great deal of attention has been focussed on the immediate consequences for our daily lives, there is a growing body of speculation about the …
What exactly is workplace wellbeing?
Sometimes it’s worth taking a step back from even the most widely discussed topics to consider what we might mean by them. This might be especially true of a subject like wellbeing, which as we have discussed elsewhere is one of those that gets talked about a lot and in such broad terms that we …
in News, Workplace Design
Agile working is transforming organisations and property markets worldwide
The words agile working might slip from our tongues easily enough these days, but just twenty-five or so years ago, before the Internet began to unravel the bonds that tied us full time to the workplace, offices were looked at in very different ways. Of course, firms have always had concerns about the efficient use …
Some happy talk about the workplace
Measuring happiness is fraught with problems, not least because it’s a difficult idea to define both as a general concept and how it relates to the economy and to work. Lord Richard Layard, programme director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics argues in his book Happiness: Lessons from a …
How office design can encourage people to do nothing except have great ideas
There is a famous episode of Seinfeld in which the character George is insulted in a business meeting and only thinks of a perfect retort while driving away from the office. This being George, he decides that he doesn’t want to waste his ‘killer line’ so engineers a second meeting so he can use it …
Feeling blue about work? We know the answer to that
Monday 20 January is ‘officially’ Blue Monday in the UK, ‘officially’ the most depressing day of the year for people at work. The anniversary is always met with a great deal of scepticism, largely because it is the brainchild of Sky’s marketing department who came up with the idea to publicise the Travel Channel in …
Agile working and the transformation of office design
The workplace has gone soft and I mean that in a good way. Over the past twenty or more years we have experienced the very welcome development of a much softer aesthetic generally when it comes to the design of offices. This process has accelerated dramatically in recent years as more and more firms have …
