June 25, 2019

Office furniture firms take their partners

by Colin Watson • Comment, Furniture, Workplace design

The development of products for the workplace follow many trends, generally aiming to provide that ideal setting for maximum effectiveness and fully tuned to the philosophies of the day. The processes involved can occupy a good proportion of time and energy for the workplace specialist and office furniture maker and feature heavily in the media. But, behind all the product cacophony, there are activities, often unseen, that make more difference to what will become available in furnishing the workplace. More →

April 2, 2019

A quarter of a century ago, the newborn Internet set office design on a different path

by Colin Watson • Comment, Furniture, Workplace design

Because we are now so immersed in technology, we can sometimes forget just how young the Internet is. It was only in 1995 that the final barriers to its full commercial development were removed. In 1994, the number of people using it worldwide was estimated at around 20 million, there were under 15,000 company websites and the UK had one ‘cybercafe’. Even so, there was something in the air. A sense that everything was about to change – and change spectacularly.

March 13, 2018

Many office furniture firms remain confused about social media and online communication

by Colin Watson • Comment, Furniture, Workplace design

At Watson King we surveyed the websites of the Top 100 European manufacturers of office furniture products, the results showed that 13 percent use no form of social media at all and 25 percent use less than three types. There are also some surprising results on which the most popular channels are. There is evidence to suggest that companies are unsure about the most effective way to use social media channels and which ones are the most appropriate to select. Also, there appears to be fundamental issues on how to integrate social media and communication channels to get the best results.

February 2, 2018

Every company should champion design and creativity at board level

by Colin Watson • Comment, Products, Workplace design

All business and life are about selling. Well that’s what Mark Price (Lord Price) the previous Managing Director of Waitrose and former Minister with the Department for International Trade said in a recent book, Workplace Fables: 147 True Life Stories. I like Mark Price and his writings but certainly don’t agree with his view about selling. To me business and life are about design. Just close your eyes and imagine life without it. If your imagination could handle this, and when you opened your eyes you would be standing in a field stark naked, because nothing apart from nature would exist. If you had bad eyesight things would be blurred and any illnesses could not be medicated. You may even have trouble eating unless you found some palatable vegetation or a creature willing to be caught, unless of course it did not eat you first.

September 5, 2014

Workplace design is increasingly interwoven with the dynamics of the city

by Colin Watson • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

The Workplace Strategy Summit, held near my adopted home town of Reading in June attracted some of the world’s most renowned experts on workplace design and management. As is the case these days, much of the talk focussed on urbanisation, both in its own right and in terms of its influence on the design of work and workplaces. One speaker, Andrew Laing of Aecom argued convincingly that the city is just as much a part of the modern workplace as the traditional office. ‘As we explore the future of work and place, we are beginning to see a shift towards an urban scale in how we frame the workplace problem,’ he said. ‘Our starting point is perhaps no longer the office but the city at large. And what we mean by the city may not be the bricks and mortar urbanism of the twentieth century, but a bricks and mortar urbanism imbued with digital information and connectivity: a powerful combination of the physical and digital.’

July 15, 2014

Book Review: Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval

by Colin Watson • Comment, Furniture, Work&Place, Workplace design

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace

Nikil Saval’s book Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace pulls off that rare feat for a parochial business book of being intelligent and informed (which many are) as well as fascinating, entertaining and realistic, which is rather less commonplace. He pulls this off with plenty of references to pop culture including television series such as Will and Grace, films such as Office Space and The Apartment and, inevitably, the Dilbert cartoons. There is also a great deal of enjoyment to be had in the slightly jaded tone of his writing and brutal evisceration of the likes of Tom Peters who is singled out for special criticism. So too, his take on the very idea of the ‘Office of the Future’ with its slides, basketball courts, pool tables and vivid colours.