November 30, 2022
Always connected in the age of disconnection
All of humanity’s problems,” the French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in 1654, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” He may have been right, but then again, sitting in a room alone isn’t necessarily a great state of permanent being either. There was a time we used to talk with dismay about the Japanese phenomenon of intense social distancing known as hikikomori. We would consider with horror the isolation, lack of engagement with society, poor mental health and loneliness of the people who had almost completely withdrawn to their rooms. Those poor bastards locked up in enclosed spaces linked to the outside world only by screens. More →
With more than 13.5 million workers having returned to their place of work for at least one day a week, more than four million say that they do not feel entirely safe doing so, claims new research by 
The company of your work friends can make a long day fly by, with many of us finding long lasting friendships in the workplace. To find out more about how much people love their colleagues, 
As employees across the UK are to set to embark on their return to the workplace following the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, new research by 
Organisations and businesses have a lot to contend with as they begin to reopen their offices. From social distancing, working from home policies, office layouts, hand gel stations and more. But there also remains one key issue when it comes to welcoming employees back to the office. And that’s how they will get to work in the first place. That’s because the daily commute is going to look a lot different than it did pre-COVID. Firstly, while many employers and workers see the benefit of meeting in person, the hybrid world we now live in will see workers commuting to the office far less frequently. And, if they do travel to the office, there is an element of hesitancy about how they will get there; a recent study revealed 
At 6.31 a.m. on Tuesday, December 8, 2020, the UK became the first country in the world to administer the COVID-19 vaccine. Just over five months earlier, I had been deployed to the NHS England and NHS Improvement COVID-19 vaccination programme to help drive the highly complex design and planning needed to bring the nation to this point. My role involved leading the set up and embedding of the Estates, Equipment, Consumables and Logistics workstream. The purpose of this was to establish and combine the new and existing infrastructure required in England to manage the distribution, regulation and administration of multiple vaccines so that all systems would be ready to vaccinate on the ‘go-live’ date. 
November 29, 2021
Winds of change are blowing through the office
by Ben Capper • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design