Community
As the world becomes more virtual, the role of buildings and places will increasingly be to bring people together. 2016 was a tipping point – for the first time, there were more people living in cities than in rural areas globally. People have always been drawn to economic hubs, both for work and for social reasons – meeting friends, colleagues, mentors, seeking inspiration and best practices. With this growing “meeting of minds”, the role of buildings will be to make the most of it.

Whilst we are more connected online than ever before, much of this connection is impoverished in comparison to face-to-face communication. The new building will bring people together for enriched face-to-face experiences – brainstorming, having fun, festivals and other events. It will provide more public and shared spaces, both at ground-floor level and vertically through the building, with places for gathering and socialising.

It will become increasingly important for buildings to knit into their surrounding environment – the days of the “ivory tower” are gone. Buildings in the future will be more open, transparent and connected.

Wellbeing
Wellbeing is the fastest growing trend on social media, and organisations are quickly catching on to the benefits of managing a workplace well.

In the UK alone, up to 9.9 million working days can be lost per year due to work-related stress. We work with clients implementing the Well Building standard, LEED, BREEAM and others globally – we believe wellbeing must be addressed holistically, not simply the material and energy components of buildings but designing for the occupiers and their broader needs, including physiological, social and even emotional.

It is when the building is used as a tool to drive wellbeing holistically that we see real benefits. The building occupier or owner must take an active role in shaping the design and, just as importantly, managing the spaces. Building design already takes into account the physiological components such as heat and light (studies have shown a 10-25% improvement in employee performance when daylight is available), but the best buildings are now designing for social interaction, incorporating a range of spaces to meet, work, exercise and relax, from quiet to buzzy, from public to private, taking into account both the extrovert and the introvert.

Big data
Digital transformation is not only changing how we design and construct buildings, from BIM, to 3D printing to graphene, but also how we occupy them. The first Internet of Things building, The Edge, has an intelligent network of sensors connected to a BIM system, which can record occupier preferences such as heat and light levels.

In the future, big data will inform building design based on occupier profiles and provide a more interactive, personalised experience. Our data shows that we over-provide office space and under-provide collaboration spaces, across sectors and geographies. At a time where there is shortage of space in cities like London and New York, office buildings are occupied approximately 60% of the time. Big data will allow us to right-size our buildings, and manage them over time to suit the occupier’s needs.

The post Designing from the inside out appeared first on Blog.

I believe that the reason questions like this are being asked ever more urgently is that we are all starting to really take in the fact that work is following people. We’re all probably familiar with the statistic – 80% of an organisation’s costs are its people – so it does seem counter-productive when a company designs its spaces according simply to cost saving, rather than people: how they work, how they want to work, and what the business wants from them.

I wrote in the previous issue of See Further about the link between happiness and productivity – happiness is a big factor in efficiency, trust, and attracting the best people in the first place (not to mention retaining them). But we know better than to focus on this alone, and occupiers are wary of fads that cater too whimsically to staff’s apparent happiness – more than one client has, when discussing a brief, pleaded “please, no slides or bean bags”.

But leaving aside the debate on playful design (which Gavin Hughes recently blogged about), there IS more to office design than fun. Lydia Dutton sat on the panel at the event and, talking about Argent’s development at Kings Cross, London, said “we want to create a space where people can live, work and play”. Also on the panel was Richard Jackson of UCL, who commented “students and staff need different things from our spaces; the challenge is creating space to suit both sets of needs”. And that’s before getting started on what the parents of the students might want to see!

So what we’re hearing, in different forms, is “how can one space be many things to many people?” The key to this is asking the right questions, in the right order. What do we want to do with our space is where occupiers often start, but a more urgent question is, What do we want to get out of our people? Starting at this point, more questions become obvious – what kind of behaviour do we want to encourage? How can we represent our organisation’s values? And suddenly there are a lot of important tributaries of information, all feeding into what to do with your space.

So – work is following people, and workspaces will be all the more interesting for it. I look forward to seeing where it can go next.

Nicola Gillen (nicola.gillen@archtam.com) is a director of ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in London.

The post Work follows people: creating spaces that work appeared first on Blog.