You may know that feeling: you’ve attended an event, chatted with lots of interesting people, you’ve gone home and the next day you continue with your day-to-day work, more often than not forgetting those conversations and your new contacts quickly again. But sometimes, just sometimes things happen afterwards, you follow up, or your contact follows…
Buildings / Configuration / People / Space / Space Syntax / Usage
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…
Joanne K Rowling is a genius for many reasons. The world of Harry Potter that she has created is fascinating for adults and children alike. It is also a world that has become the subject of research – there is an annual Harry Potter Conference in Philadelphia, where literature scholars debate the paternal atonement of…
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…
While I normally write about space and buildings and how they are used, I want to blog about blogging today. More specifically on getting students to blog. There is a lot of interest in academic blogging, so it’s time we think about starting the next generation of academics – our students – early and get them to…
A couple of weeks ago, floor plan and seating arrangements of the 250 people running the General Election campaign for the Labour party were revealed in the Guardian. The article outlined teams and their tasks, where they all sat and how the war room operated on a day-to-day basis. It is a fascinating account of life inside a…
A lot of my architecture friends got all excited this week by the completion of the new Learning Hub of Nanyang Technical University in Singapore by Heatherwick Studio. Quite rightly so! It seems to be an amazing building – made up of twelve stacked towers arranged around a central courtyard, allowing views up, down and…
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…
This blog post was born out of serendipity. Which is only fitting, since it also covers the idea of serendipity. It all started with a typical day in my life as an academic: I did about ten different things at the same time and two of them suddenly created an unexpected connection in my mind;…
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…
This last post in the series ‘ Five Things You Might Not Know About Offices‘ will focus on the issue of workplace configuration, more specifically it will look at open-plan offices. The open-plan office has taken a battering recently both in the media with headlines such as “Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the…
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…
spaceandorganisation 