Columnists
May 6, 2013
Office design goes to the movies. Part 9: BladeRunner
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace design
[embedplusvideo height=”146″ width=”210″ standard=”https://www.youtube.com/v/yWPyRSURYFQ?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=yWPyRSURYFQ&width=210&height=146&start=&stop=132&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep3143″ /] Ridley Scott was one of the pioneers of a film aesthetic that mashes the past with the future, the grime and the gleam. It was a pioneering idea at the time but it’s familiar now. We now accept that the future looks a lot like the past […]
May 4, 2013
Seven thoughts on the UK facilities management association merger
by Simon Heath • Comment, Facilities management
With breathless excitement a press release announces the proposed merger of all of the UK’s major facilities management and support services trade associations, or rather notes that they: “have agreed to the concept of forming one single and united body to represent facilities management and support services.” With a sense of crushing inevitability the first […]
May 1, 2013
Video: “sitting is the smoking of our generation”
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace, Workplace design
[embedplusvideo height=”151″ width=”220″ standard=”https://www.youtube.com/v/iE9HMudybyc?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=iE9HMudybyc&width=220&height=151&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep7092″ /] In which a businesswoman rejoicing in the name Nilofer Merchant argues that one of the major causes of ill health in the world today is our sedentary lifestyle, and suggests a small idea that just might have a big impact on your life and health: Next time […]
May 1, 2013
Resistance to workplace change marks the passing of the old order
by Martin Brooker • Comment, Facilities management, Technology
When Vodafone announced in March that the UK’s businesses could save up to £34 billion with the more widespread application of flexible working models, the research to support the claim had two very familiar components. The first was a crystal clear business case, the second an admission that the message was still not quite getting […]
April 29, 2013
What Søren Kierkegaard can teach us about workplace design and management
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design
Søren Kierkegaard was a Nineteenth Century Danish philosopher and proto-existentialist. Not for him the hazy, romantic ideals of many of his contemporaries. He was one of the thinkers who gave birth to the Twentieth Century with its focus on the individual, reality and life in a sometimes uncaring world, although he was no atheist like many of […]
April 19, 2013
Female-friendly employers named as progress of women in boardrooms stalls
by Sara Bean • Comment, Knowledge, News, Workplace
In an interview this week on BBC’s Newsnight, Facebook’s CFO Sheryl Sandberg, revealed how she’d come to notice a growing gender imbalance as she moved up the corporate ladder. As her new book Lean in, points out, 30 years after women became 50 per cent of the college graduates in the United States, men still […]
April 19, 2013
High wire act: balancing attitudes and expectations in the workplace
by Simon Heath • Comment, Facilities management, Property, Workplace, Workplace design
This week, with some fanfare and a modest splash on social media, CBRE, the Global real estate services provider launched The Workshop Idea. One of its stated aims is the revitalisation of our high streets and, with the introduction of local venues in a number of differing guises, an increase in the degree of choice […]
April 16, 2013
Video: how we need to break with the past to optimise what we do now
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Technology
[embedplusvideo height=”146″ width=”210″ standard=”https://www.youtube.com/v/HUgGo-U2Eig?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=HUgGo-U2Eig&width=210&height=146&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep3399″ /] Dave Coplin, the ‘Chief Envisioning Officer’ at Microsoft, explores with the RSA how we might apply technology in new ways to transform the way we work. He starts with a look at how we are constrained by the past, with the example of the QWERTY keyboard which […]
April 15, 2013
When the world’s cities became the stars of the show
by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Comment
The City has always been source of fascination for artists. The growth of cities in the 20th Century was paralleled by their growing depiction in art. Whereas early paintings from the likes of Edward Hopper and the photogravure prints of Alfred Stieglitz would invariably focus on individuals within the context of the city, as the […]
April 11, 2013
Why we might all get more done if we did things more slowly
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology
May 10, 2013
The biggest challenge is building flexibility into an office design
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design
The design of offices and the furniture that fills them matters because of what they tell us about how we work, how organisations function and even what is happening in the economy. If you want to know what’s going on, take a look at the places we work and the things with which we surround […]