The English language is replete with examples of colours being used to describe ideas and emotions. We see red and feel blue. We go puce with rage and are tickled pink. The jealous are green and the cowardly yellow. We are encouraged not to engage in black and white thinking.

Any trend in office design is always the end result of the complex interplay of a number of forces. This truism is what makes office design such a compelling field of study. Watching workplace trends tells us so much about the world in which we live. Look beyond the aesthetics of any well-designed office and …

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.

I recently shared a piece from the Sedus What’s Up blog on social media. It was the one about the discovery of agile working practices in a 1950s coal field in Nottinghamshire and the implications for the future of work. Not so, I was informed by a man called Eike Spengler. It was actually practiced …

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 …

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.