May 16, 2014

UK one of the top global business destinations for sales growth and profitability

by Mark Eltringham • Furniture, News, Workplace design

Global manufacturing executives rank the UK as one of the top destinations for future sales growth and profitability, according to KPMG’s latest Global Manufacturing Outlook report published this week. This places the UK ahead of Germany, India and Japan and alongside China, beaten only by the US. The report also notes that the UK is leading the world in the growth of 3D printing. The survey of 460 executives representing business with an annual turnover in excess of $5 billion reveals that the UK is ranked third in terms of those countries in which global companies expect profit growth over the next two years. The focus on new technology and materials in the report reveals that 85 percent of UK manufacturers are already moving to 3D printing to reduce their product development life cycle, as British office furniture maker Senator did in prototyping its Ad-Lib range (pictured).

May 14, 2014

Spending on office furniture becomes a US political football

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Furniture, Public Sector, Workplace design

We’ve mentioned this before but when it comes to riling those who see public sector spending as inherently wasteful, nothing gets their backs up quite so much as the buying of lightbulbs and office furniture. You can come up with your own theories on why that might be (and I hope you do), but it’s been proved yet again as Fox News and other right wing commentators and media in the US have risen up in moral indignation at the news that the Internal Revenue Service has spent $96.5 million on office furniture and refurbishment during the last five years of the Obama administration. Now of course, this is just the touchstone for griping about government spending in general and Barack Obama in particular, but the US is clearly not alone in having an issue with office furniture purchases and you have to wonder exactly why this is.

April 17, 2014

Gallery: Interiors Group completes office fit-out at Instinctif Partners

by Mark Eltringham • Company news, Flooring, Furniture, Workplace design

The Interiors Group has completed a project for the design and fit-out of the relocated offices for Instinctif Partners, an international business communications consultancy now situated at 65 Gresham Street, London. The relocation coincided with the launch of Instinctif Partners’ new name (having previously been known as College Group) so the new design became an expression of the new identity. The office fit-out project includes joinery, the installation of a media wall, bespoke feature walls, reception desk and lighting. The flooring consists of porcelain tiles and carpet from Interface. The backlit reception desk displays the client’s twelve corporate colours on rotation. Leather seating was specified for the visitors’ waiting area. The open plan office is designed as a circular newsroom with a high table in the heart of the space highlighted by an oversized dome pendant. The dining area has been fitted out with LED screens and furnished in white. More →

April 2, 2014

When worlds collide: a preview of the Salone Internationale del Mobile in Milan

by Justin Miller • Comment, Events, Furniture, Workplace design

Don’t even think about going to Milan for a break at this time of year – you probably won’t get a hotel room. Every year the Salone Internationale del Mobile (International Furniture Fair) and Milan Design Week ensure that hotels are full despite room rates soaring for the duration of this world class exhibition. Salone is the show to attend if you want to know what’s going on in the world of furniture design. Along with Orgatec, Neocon, CIFF, Clerkenwell Design Week and the Stockholm Furniture Fair, Salone makes up the Grand Tour of furniture and design shows around the world. These shows not only provide an international showcase the very latest in furniture design, each also offers its own unique insight into the way we work and live. And they do so on a massive scale. In the case of Milan, this means extending the show beyond the halls of the central Rho fairgrounds to use locations around the whole city, when it takes place next week.

March 26, 2014

The enduring need to put a bit more of the M into facilities management

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Furniture, Workplace design

Shutterstock’s new offices, Empire State Building

It may well be a statement of the obvious, but it’s worth reminding ourselves sometimes that the term facilities management consists of two words. There is often a bit too much emphasis on the facilities and a bit too little on the management and sometimes we look for design and product solutions to problems that would be better managed in some way. You can put this down to a number of things but to some extent at least it’s down the idea that when you are determined to use a hammer, every job looks like a nail. Obviously the media takes some of the blame for this mindset because it often earns income from businesses who want to sell their stuff to solve particular problems rather than focus on the idea that many of them can be addressed either as a management issue or in combination with products and design.

March 24, 2014

Public sector purchasing doesn’t need this kind of lightbulb moment

by Mark Eltringham • Furniture, Products, Public Sector, Workplace design

The latest of the weekly kickings reserved for the UK’s public sector purchasing community comes in the shape of a BBC Panorama documentary alleging that a range of frauds and cock-ups cost the National Health Service around £7 billion a year. The NHS denies these figures but there are clearly obvious and serious deficiencies in the way goods and services are procured across the public sector, as we have reported. Yet there is a flipside to such reports which tap in to (and sometimes pander to) a widespread scepticism of the way the public sector goes about its business. So we must first ask whether an equivalent private sector organisation with a budget of £109 billion a year would not also be open to a wide range of eye-wateringly expensive failures, inefficiencies and frauds. And secondly we must question whether the great British public, along with some businesses, are generally able to grasp the issues involved.

March 13, 2014

Insight confirms partnership with Clerkenwell Design Week

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Events, Flooring, Furniture, Lighting, Workplace design

Workplace Insight has confirmed a partnership agreement with Europe’s largest commercial interior design event, Clerkenwell Design Week. The event takes place each year, uniquely using the showrooms and other spaces that make the Clerkenwell area of London home to more creative businesses, designers and architects per square mile than anywhere else on the planet. It is also part of the East London Tech City hub. Now in its fifth year, the 2013 event attracted 50,000 registered attendees and thousands of others visitors. Insight will be covering the event, which will take place from 20 – 22 May, focussing especially on the intellectual content that forms a central element of the week’s content. We will be inviting the many eminent speakers and commentators to share thoughts and ideas in the build up and aftermath.

February 14, 2014

A Silicon Valley office that embraces classic design to create its buzz

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Comment, Furniture, Workplace design

It is now common for tech and media businesses to take inspiration for the design of their offices from their local Wacky Warehouse, with treehouses, slides, acid coloured cushions, chairs, play areas and other sub-juvenilia thrown into the building in the name of both ‘fun’ and an assumption that the Gen Y employees they are so patronisingly fixated on are only recently off the teat. Meanwhile some are clearly drawn back to the more sober, rational and classic styles that have long attracted corporations, especially in the US. There is something familiar about an HQ like that designed for San Francisco based software developers Giant Pixel by Studio O+A which evidently harks back to the era of modernism and post war futurism associated with architect/designers like Eero Saarinen.

December 1, 2013

Case study: dPOP’s jaw-dropping new offices light the road ahead for Detroit

by Rob Kirkbride • Case studies, Facilities management, Flooring, Furniture, Workplace design

If you think you know what’s going on in Detroit based on the stories of the city’s financial woes and pictures of some crumbling buildings, it is worth a visit to the offices of dPOP, the two month old design firm with origins in creating the award-winning office spaces for Quicken Loans and its family of companies.The design firm’s space in the basement of a long defunct Detroit bank embodies what being from the Motor City is all about — being tough, but talented; gritty yet glamorous; fun with a funky twist.They design like they don’t care what you think — and that might just be true. Their own offices and those they created for the 11,000 workers that were moved from divergent suburban sites to the center of Detroit are bold, bright and fun. Most of all fun. But the result is spectacular.

November 19, 2013

2020 vision is a useless metaphor for far-sightedness in a number of ways

by Simon Heath • Comment, Facilities management, Furniture, Technology, Workplace design

The year 2020 is a mere seven years away. Yet the designers of the future workplace and those who invite them to talk about it are still referring to it as if it marks the next frontier of human endeavour and as if we weren’t already up to our collective armpits in the 21st century. The idea of 20/20 vision is considered, in ophthalmological circles at least, to represent “normal” visual acuity and is dependent on the sharpness of the retinal focus within the eye and the sensitivity of the interpretative faculty of the brain. In practical terms, this means it’s about seeing and interpreting what is directly in front of us at a distance of around 6 metres. So as a metaphor for farsightedness regarding the future of work or workplaces it’s always been a poor one. And as we get closer to the eponymous year, it becomes worse day by day.

November 5, 2013

Winners of competition to uncover ‘Workplace of the Future’ announced

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Furniture, News, Workplace design

PopUP concept by Cincinnati School of Architecture and Interior Design

The results of a competition designed to showcase the Workplace of the Future, sponsored by Staples have been announced. The contest, run in conjunction with US based Metropolis magazine, attracted entries from some 200 architects and interior designers. The winner was Joe Filippelli, who created Vertical Flux, which is described as ‘a comfort-based approach to the 2020 workplace with fluctuating atmospheres’. The runner-up was CoLab from Rotterdam based Eckhart Interior Design with a ‘digital re-envisioning of the classic corporate office… which incorporates technology in a way that allows employees to work at any location throughout the office, collaborating with co-workers in any imaginable configuration.’

October 25, 2013

The Great Gatsby and the rehabilitation of the office cubicle

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Furniture, Workplace design

The finest closing sentence of any novel in my opinion is that in The Great Gatsby. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” It is a reference to the futility of our attempts to escape the past, even as we look to the future, dreaming of how “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther”. F Scott Fitzgerald was referring to people when he wrote it, and Jay Gatsby in particular, but it’s a passage that resonates in a number of ways, especially in those areas of our lives that deal most intimately with what it means to be human. And one of these is self-evidently the workplace, where any articular attempt to define the ideal office for a particular time, including the future, is complicated by the fact that we must always meet the needs of the beasts that inhabit it. Regardless of the tools we have at our disposal with which to work more effectively, or just plain ‘more’ we remain fundamentally the same animals we were thousands of years ago.