May 2, 2023

BCO Awards winners for North of England again focus on sustainable office design

by Neil Franklin • Environment, News, Property, Workplace design

Following last week’s announcement of the annual BCO Awards winners for London, the British Council for Offices has announced the winners of its annual Awards for the North of England. In fact all but one of the winners are located in Greater Manchester and the one that isn’t lies within twenty miles of it. The organisers suggest that the theme of sustainable office design runs through the submissions of the winning entries. More →

April 26, 2023

Biophilic office design has a clear business case, report claims

by Neil Franklin • News, Wellbeing, Workplace design

A new report, Reap What You Sow: Valuing Workplaces that Grow Good Ideas from PLP Labs sets out to explain the process of measuring and monetising the wellbeing and environmental value of biophilic office design. The report argues that in corporate real estate, the environment impacts the bottom line. PLP’s study – run in collaboration with academics from Loughborough University, the University of Reading, and Benholm claims to enable real estate clients to fairly evaluate the worth of investing in nature alongside other project costs. More →

April 20, 2023

More than half of UK workers find their office design uninspiring

by Freddie Steele • News, Workplace design

British workers are finding their offices and places of work to be severely lacking in inspiration and innovation, according to a new poll from office design and fit-out firm Claremont. The survey of more than 1,000 office workers across a range of sectors set out to identify the impact of an office on a workforce’s behaviour and how staff need to feel in order to be happy, healthy and productive. More →

August 3, 2022

Office design goes to the movies

by Mark Eltringham • Features, Workplace design

Following our recent attempts to create a rudimentary playlist of songs that tell us something, or perhaps nothing, about office design, office life and office furniture, here’s another look at how the parochial world of the workplace can brush up against popular culture. It does this unnoticed for most people, I suppose, but not for those of us bound up in this world. We’re not the sort of people who can ignore the regular, brief glimpse of an Aeron chair’s ubiquitous mesh without a synapse of recognition sparking up. So, here is a brief rundown of nine movies that use office design to make a plot point or set up a character development.

April 13, 2022

The cargo cult of modern office design

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace design

The idea of the cargo cult derives from anthropological observations made about the behaviour of societies that encounter more technologically advanced societies. In particular it is rooted in those rituals and objects created by Pacific islanders in an attempt to attract modern goods and technology and generally earn favour with people who they thought could prevent terrible events. More →

April 12, 2022

The colour of magic in office design

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace design

In the Discworld series of novels, the author Terry Pratchett introduces us to the colour of magic. He calls it octarine, a sort of greenish purple, described as ‘the undisputed pigment of the imagination’. It’s all fanciful but, in fact, such unseeable colours exist for the human eye. They are seemingly invisible to us most of the time because of the limitations of our vision and not just because they exist outside of the usual visible spectrum. More →

April 12, 2022

Sustainable office design relies on everybody sharing knowledge

by Harsha Kotak • Comment, Environment, Workplace design

Back in 2018, I launched a group called Women in Office Design. I wanted to inspire and empower women involved in the profession of office design and creation. The opportunity to develop and enhance my skills and understanding was a fundamental reason why I formed WOD. Reading and research is beneficial but it’s important to take the time to reach out to others in the industry, especially on the most important issues of our day such as sustainable office design. More →

March 15, 2022

Inclusive office design guide published by Business Disability Forum

by Neil Franklin • News, Workplace design

The Business Disability Forum (BDF) has published a new global guide which sets out to showing how all businesses can make their built environments accessible to the one billion people in world who have a disability. Having a disability can affect how a person accesses, navigates, and uses the spaces and structures around them. Built environments include everything from entrances, exits, stairs, lifts, signage, to parking, green spaces, roads, and transport systems so inclusive office design should address a wide range of issues. More →

March 14, 2022

A just in time lesson about office design

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace design

The nascent years of new ways of working in the late 80s and early 90s coincided with a widely held but soon to be discarded belief that the Japanese had cracked management practices. So it was perhaps inevitable that the principles of a process called just in time manufacturing – most famously applied in the factories of Toyota – should migrate to new forms of office design and the rapidly developing practice of flexible working.

August 27, 2021

UK office design scene takes a fresh approach at the Clerkenwell Open

by Freddie Steele • Company news, Workplace design

The new Clerkenwell Open event organised by the BCFA and Women in Office Design takes place on the 9th and 10th September 2021. Although long the epicentre of the UK’s office design community, this is a new two day showroom trail event which aims to provide a focus and a clear statement that Clerkenwell is “alive” again, and will provide a combined opportunity for architects, designers, specifiers , dealers and end users to network in person and exchange views. More →

March 31, 2021

From the archive: A new approach to office design is redefining property ⁰

by Gary Chandler • Comment, Facilities management, Property, Workplace design

At the end of the 18th Century it was becoming apparent that overpopulation was something the human race would need to address for perhaps the first time. Advances in technology and the urbanisation that followed the Industrial Revolution had created a new set of challenges. These were most famously laid out in a 1798 book called An Essay on the Principle of Population, written by an English cleric called Thomas Malthus.

March 23, 2021

Sustainable office design will not be possible until we are clear about a few things

by Joanna Knight • Comment, Environment, Furniture, Workplace design

Many organisations make bold claims about their zero carbon ambitions. Even if they don’t, most have sustainability statements. Yet the environmental impact of office furniture and sophisticated approaches to sustainable office design seem to be way down the ‘pecking order’. During the last year, we have read considerable commentary about the office – starting with its death but moving onto predictions of the ‘new dawn’ with more versatile and healthier workspaces. More →