In this post, Julie Zook and I sit down to discuss some key headlines of our recent co-edited book, The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture, which was published open access with UCL Press on 22 March 22. Health as social, hospitals as social We conceived The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture in late 2019, just…
You will know by now that I am a Harry Potter fan. If not, go and read my piece on Hogwarts and how the school building influences teaching and learning practices. But today I don’t want to speak about schools. I want to talk about flexible workspace. One of Rowling’s brilliant ideas is the Room…
Knowledge is a funny thing. A lot of people would agree that a firm’s competitive advantage in today’s business world is based on knowledge generation and transfer. Often the word ‘flow’ is used. But how something abstract like knowledge could flow (like water down a river) or be transferred (like money) isn’t quite as clear. Some scholars…
Collaboration is one of the most ubiquitous buzzwords in the modern business world. Collaboration is everywhere. Companies want their staff to collaborate more. Workspaces are designed to support collaboration. You’re frowned upon if you publish an academic paper on your own. Why didn’t you collaborate? Does no one like working with you? While co-authoring is…
I’ve recently read Scott Berkun‘s excellent book ‘A Year Without Pants‘, where he reports from his experiment of working for Automattic (the wonderful guys behind WordPress). He was tasked with the introduction of team structures into the perceived chaos of an entrepreneurial, DIY-minded and bazaar-like organisational culture. The book is remarkable on various accounts: It…
In this fourth instalment of my blog series ‘Five Things You Might Not Know About Offices’ I want to look at common layout choices and the consequences these choices have. A very popular myth in office design asserts that an open-plan office accommodation is preferable because it increases communication among colleagues in contrast to a…
This week’s blog post of the series ‘Five Things You Might Not Know About Offices‘ will look a bit closer at the activities of people in offices; more specifically, it will focus on movement. There isn’t really a myth to be dispelled this time, I rather want us to take a fresh look at how…
While last week’s post “The Office Is Not Dead” established that we still need the physicality of a shared workplace in order to create awareness, co-presence, encounter and identity among employees, this week’s second blog post in the series 5 Things You Might Not Know About Offices will focus on patterns of communication. The myth…
Myths and common preconceptions about offices and workplaces abound. We are almost constantly bombarded with supposedly new ideas about management, workplace design, workplace trends and the general debate on the ‘future of the office’. Quite often it is merely terminology that is reinvented (‘Agile Working’), attempting to add a new sparkle to old (and possibly…
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