This year’s ICFF furniture show in New York marked a spirited revival

by Rob Kirkbride • Comment, Events, Furniture, Workplace design

The last time I attended ICFF in New York, the show was weak, eclipsed by myriad design events around the city and not quite sure of where it fit in. That was a few years ago. This year, it was bigger and better in many ways. ICFF is very much alive, thriving in fact. The show has exploded in importance, size and scope in a few short years. Many in the office furniture industry who gave up on ICFF need to return. Others are seeing the value of the show and the surrounding events (which continue to grow as well) for the first time. Still, for the office furniture world, ICFF is more about art, design and ideas such as chairs from Fritz Hansen (above). Don’t come to rub elbows with your contract furniture colleagues. Instead, come to be inspired by what is possible – even though some of it is more bespoke that this industry is used to.

March 23, 2015

How artificial light affects our health in more ways than we think

by Mark Eltringham • Knowledge, Technology, Wellbeing, Workplace design

Life on Earth has developed over the course of billions of years to attune its cycles and rhythms to the fixed routines of light and dark. Yet the modern world counters this hardwired biology in humans and radically increases our likelihood of developing a range of physiological and mental illnesses and conditions. That is the main conclusion of a new paper from Richard G. Stevens and Yong Zhu published by the Royal Society last week. The article outlines how inadequate light during the day, especially inside buildings, coupled with overexposure to artificial light in the evening not only disrupts our sleep patterns but alters our physiognomy at a metabolic, hormonal and even genetic level. The report also highlights how this can account for ‘a portion of the modern pandemics of breast and prostate cancers, obesity, diabetes and depression’.

July 10, 2013

Design Museum sale paves way for resurrection of Commonwealth Institute

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Comment, News, Property, Workplace design

Deskheads of a certain vintage may have viewed the news that Zaha Hadid had bought the Design Museum’s London home for £10 million in a somewhat different light to much of the media that reported the sale. While journalists succumbed to the apparently irresistible pull of architectural headline magnet Zaha, to some of us the interesting part of the story was that the sale finally freed the Design Museum to move to the long empty Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington. The building is one of the most architecturally important modern buildings in London and has a long association not only with The Commonwealth Institute educational charity but as a venue for cultural events and exhibitions of design, not least the now defunct Prima and Spectrum exhibitions which did so much to promote commercial interior design in the UK.