Search Results for: internet of things

December 17, 2018

Meatspace, cyberspace, the uncertainty of expertise and some other stuff

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Technology, Workplace, Workplace design

The sign that somebody knows their stuff about a subject is often that whatever they say about it is full of questions, equivocations and caveats. They’ll often start out by saying things are complicated in mitigation of their opinion on a particular topic. They’ll say there are no silver bullets. It’s almost always neophytes, chancers and the conflicted that offer certainty. To prove my point here is David D’Souza of the CIPD making a point about the tendency to look for pat, narrow solutions to complex, broad challenges. Not only does he have something interesting to say, you know that he has the depth and breadth of knowledge to expand on each of the points he makes with yet more sophistication. It’s fractal thinking.

December 14, 2018

Bruntwood launches design now, pay later service for occupiers

by Neil Franklin • Company news, Property, Workplace design

Property and flexible office firm Bruntwood has launched ‘Made & Managed’ which it claims is a service enabling occupiers to benefit from a ‘design now, pay later’ approach to designing and creating bespoke offices. The service is based around the idea that tenants absorb design and fit-out costs into a monthly bill, meaning no upfront costs.

November 28, 2018

Line up of speakers announced for Workplace Trends: Research Spring Summit

by Maggie Procopi • Events, Facilities management, News, Technology, Workplace design

The research-driven Workplace Trends Spring Summit returns for 2019. We have two sessions with invited guest speakers, our keynote and the after lunch debate. Following a recent Call for Abstracts and a blind peer review by our two moderators for the day, Nigel Oseland (Workplace Unlimited) and Mark Eltringham (Workplace Insight), the remaining sessions have now been filled with the highest ranked submissions.

October 31, 2018

Top global industries leading the way in remote work

by Neil Franklin • Features, Flexible working, Property

More business owners are swapping rigid 9-5 schedules and traditional office environments in favour of flexible space and remote work as an option for saving costs, retaining employees and encouraging a healthy work-life balance. With this in mind, Instant Offices has investigated what industries are leading the way for remote working and how to overcome the typical challenges of managing a remote team.

October 11, 2018

How the media oversold standing desks as a fix for inactivity at work

by Catriona Bonfiglioli and Josephine Chau • Features, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Sitting is so culturally ingrained at work, at the wheel, in front of the TV and at the movies, it takes a great effort to imagine doing these things standing up, let alone pedalling as you work at a bike desk. So, when the world’s first specific guidelines on sitting and moving at work were published, they generated headlines such as: Abandon your chair for four hours to stay healthy, office workers are told and: Stand up at your desk for two hours a day, new guidelines say. But what many media reports did not mention was the guidelines were based on limited evidence. They were also co-authored by someone with commercial links to standing desks (desks you raise and lower to work at standing or sitting), a link not declared when the guidelines were first published in a journal. Media reports also overplayed the dangers of sitting at work, incorrectly saying it wiped out the benefits of exercise. Our new study reveals the nature of this media coverage and its role in overselling standing desks as a solution to inactivity at work.

September 14, 2018

All those workplace trends lists that you see? We’ve been there before ⁰

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

Conference and show season looms and with it arrives the annual swarm of workplace trend forecasts. These are often presented as groundbreaking but many of them are indistinguishable from each other and based on some very familiar tropes and assumptions. These days such things tend to be shaped into lists, because that’s how the Internet likes it. That is all perfectly natural and we are free to make our own mind up which of these features are meaningful and which are hack jobs. No football pundit was ever fired for stringing together clichés rather than thinking and talking, and no marketing person has ever lost their job for publishing a list of Ten Trends.

November 24, 2017

White Paper: intuitive design and the changing face of workplace interactions

by Oliver Ronald • Briefing, Features, Premium Content, Workplace design

In his famous 1988 book The Design of Everyday Things, the cognitive scientist Donald Norman suggests that the way we interact with objects and our surroundings is determined almost entirely by their design. People cannot be the primary reason things succeed or fail, because they are constant, while the design of the object itself is the variable. People can expect to learn how to use things better, but without an underlying people-centric and intuitive approach to design, the design will fail to some degree or other. He concludes that the designer should focus their attention on the interaction between people and the design of objects and surroundings. This principle becomes more relevant with each passing day, as the number of interactions we have with designed objects increases. This is most obvious with regard to our interactions with technology, but it is also apparent across our entire lives.

January 24, 2017

The impact of technology on corporate real estate: A Panglossian future? ⁰

by Antony Slumbers • Features, Property, Technology, Workplace design

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the concept of Loss Aversion in 1984, highlighting people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Most studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. Lose £100 and we will feel a remorse that easily outweighs winning £100. In a similar fashion we find it very hard to see future positives when confronted with short term loses. We understand easily what we have lost but cannot imagine what there is to be gained. Furthermore, as Frederic Bastiat wrote in an 1850 paper, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”, man has a tendency to “pursue a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, rather than a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil”. Put these together and it is no wonder that, by and large, the future of work, corporate real estate and the workplace is so widely misunderstood.

December 1, 2016

Study highlights the main causes of workplace disruption and irritation ⁰

by Neil Franklin • News, Technology

New research released by Samsung Electronics claims that UK small business workers are losing 5.5 hours a week because of workplace disruptions and irritations. Unsurprisingly, technology issues caused the most lost time, at an average of 27 minutes a day (or just over two hours per week). Crashing computers (92 percent) and slow internet (92 percent) were the two biggest technology factors annoying small business workers, closely followed by no access to emails (85 percent). Distractions caused by co-workers caused 22 minutes a day of downtime (just under two hours per week). Moaning (which annoys 84 percent of small business workers), eating loudly or messily (83 percent) and interruptions while talking (80 percent) were the biggest irritations. General office issues contributed 19 minutes a day (1.5 hours a week) in lost time. Being too hot or too cold (82 percent), uncomfortable seating (81 percent) and a messy workplace (80 percent) were the top frustrations.

October 18, 2016

The global uberification of commercial property and the workplace ⁰

by Anthony Brown • Facilities management, Features, Property, Technology, Workplace design

Technology doesn’t just transform the world, it reshapes our language. So, we all need to get used to the word uberification as well as the idea of it. Based on the success of the on demand taxi service Uber, the word refers to the way a product or service becomes available to customers on demand via the Internet. Customers book a service only at the point of consumption. This represents an entirely new commercial model and is the defining characteristic of the new 21st Century economy. Uber may have provided the tipping point, going from start up to market valuation of $66 billion in just 7 years, but its success has given us a name for a process that is reshaping businesses and customer experiences across the entire economy, including in the commercial property sector.

October 5, 2016

An enlightened approach is needed for the new era of artificial intelligence ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology

One of the explanations for both Brexit and the once implausible idea of an obvious demagogue like Donald Trump assuming the world’s highest office is that we now live in a post rational world. In plain parlance this was best summarised by Michael Gove’s proclamation during the Brexit debate that we have all had enough of experts, but a growing number of intellectuals are starting to question whether we are seeing the roll back of the Enlightenment. The suggestion is, that in a world awash with information, we are retreating to a more visceral worldview. If the facts don’t fit with the way we feel, then they just have to go. While rationalists continue to invoke the ideals of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Paine, Voltaire and Spinoza, they are often doing so in a self-imposed echo chamber and so are genuinely horrified to find that there is an outside world that has little time for Reason with a capital R. This explains all you need to know about the post Brexit meltdown.

August 4, 2016

Connectivity creep is driving more people to switch off their devices ⁰

by Mark Eltringham • Flexible working, News, Technology, Wellbeing

Fifteen million UK internet users have undertaken a ‘digital detox’ in a bid to strike a healthier balance between technology and life beyond the screen, according to a new Ofcom study. The study of around 2,500 people suggests that our reliance on the internet is affecting people’s personal and working lives, leading many to seek time away from the web to spend time with friends and family. Ofcom’s Communications Market Report 2016 finds that one in three adult internet users (34 percent), equivalent to 15 million people in the UK, has sought a period of time offline, with one in ten (11 percent) doing so in the last week alone. Of these digital down-timers, 25 percent spent up to a day internet-free; 20 percent took up to a week off; and 5 percent went web-free for up to a whole month. The most common reasons for taking a time out were to spend more time doing other things (cited by 44 percent) and more time talking to friends and family (38 percent).