Extra! Extra!

I know. I know. It’s been a while. But we have been busy here at DEGW working on lots of innovative and interesting projects, so we will have more to blog about soon! In the meantime, here are some links to what we are reading around here. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook!

Designing a More Work-Friendly Workspace
Entrepreneur Magazine By Katherine Duncan
Groupthink
The New Yorker By Jonah Lehrer
Facebook’s ‘Cool Space’ Campus Points to Future of Office Growth
Bloomberg News By Dan Levy
The human factor in service design
McKinsey Quarterly By John DeVine, Shyam Lal, and Michael Zea
In Tech, Starting Up by Failing
New York Times By Jenna Wortham
Less Space, More Green
Building Operation Management By Casey Laughman
Check Out The Swanky, Brand New Office Of Seamless 
Business Insider By Daniel Goodman
X Marks the Spot- Columbia’s Studio-X, a think tank with labs all over the world, may be a new model for design education
Metropolis Magazine By Ian Volner
In Data Deluge, Multitaskers Go to Multiscreens
New York Times By Matt Richtel

The Changing Impact of Location in Workplace Premises Selection

By Dinesh Acharya
Recently I attended the CoreNet  event in New York that explored “The Talent Pool & Real Estate: How the Workforce Continues to Drive Location Decisions”. The following blog stems from that discussion:

In today’s knowledge economy and with new ways of working, workplace location can be as important as workplace facilities, if not more so. An issue from a tenant perspective are matters of cost, convenience, corporate image and resiliency in addition to meeting the preferences of the next generation of workers, many of who value their lifestyle options as highly as their career options.

Combined with the increasing competition for talent globally, many leading edge companies are using their location, workplace and corporate cultures as key tools in recruiting and retaining the right people.

Learning Space Toolkit: Your Input

By Jung Hoon Kim
The Learning Space Toolkit is an IMLS-funded project to develop a web-based collection of tools, references, and resources for planning, evaluating, and operating technology-rich informal learning spaces. The toolkit will enable campus administrators, space planners / designers, facility managers, and campus experts such as library and IT professionals to envision needs for space, technology, and services and then plan for how best to meet those needs.

We are conducting a brief survey of potential users to gather feedback on priorities for the tools we are planning to develop. The survey is organized by the six sections within the toolkit (Roadmap, Needs Assessment, Space Types, Services, Technology, and Assembly instructions), offering an opportunity to rate the importance of the content planned for each and let us know if anything is missing.

It will take approximately 10mins to complete and your input will be aggregated and anonymized, with your name/institution only used for response tracking purposes.

Take the survey here.

For more information about this project, please visit us at learningspacetoolkit.org

Hearting Whiteboards

By Bryant Rice
I love whiteboards. Of course I enjoy eliciting, prioritizing, editing thoughts from colleagues or outside groups, but I also enjoy reading them. I think whiteboards are the pictographs of modern life. Lascaux modernized.

Tools for Feedback and Transformation: Artifacts, Values, and Assumptions

By Paul Schuette
DEGW recently hosted a government roundtable in Washington D.C. It focused on Re-thinking Learning Environments: The Evolution of Education and Training in Government. It brought together federal government professionals to share and discuss innovations around where and how the federal workforce is learning and training today, and trends for tomorrow.

Re-Cap: DEGW’s Government Roundtable

By William Plunkett
DEGW recently hosted a roundtable event in Washington, D.C to discuss the changing nature of training, education, and learning in the public sector.  In a time when government agencies need to make every dollar go as far as possible, training programs are frequently at risk of being reduced or even eliminated.  Presenters and professionals from across the federal government were on hand to talk about how training is happening today and the trends for tomorrow.

• How can we leverage cross-agency collaboration?
• Are shared training resources helping drive government innovation?
• What have been the impacts of distributed teams on virtual learning environments?
• How are social networks and social media creating new models of education?

Happy Thanksgiving

DEGW wishes everyone a happy and safe holiday.

A Few Good Presentations

photo: Interior Design Magazine

By Katie Boothroyd
The UNWIRED WORKTECH11 Conference was held this fall at the new Nokia workplace in Sunnyvale, California. Many experts in their respective fields came to discuss and learn about topics including the future of the workplace and spatial considerations, what’s important for attracting and retaining talent, and how to “rationally” integrate virtual and mobile working into one’s work schedule.

This was my first time attending a WORKTECH conference so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Below are a few “take-a-ways” from the event:

When Service Design Meets Business: A Report from the Service Design Global Conference

By Emily Golembiewski
Recently, I attended the Global Service Design Conference with colleague Katie Boothroyd, client Greg Petroff, our favorite service design drinks host Jamin Hegeman, and a host of other wonderful folks. The service design community is truly international, and it cuts across academic, public and private industries.

Jeff Pollard from McDonald’s opened the session by showing their ‘test lab’  which is a giant warehouse with several working scale mock-ups of kitchens. These environments allow them to test innovations in spatial design and service design, and to train staff members in a contained (but realistic) environment. How wonderful would it be to be able to have full scale mock-ups before committing to construction and build-out schedules?

Finding Value In the Desert

By Adam Stoltz
I find attending industry conferences incredibly valuable. This is important, especially considering the rising costs of registration fees, travel and those little bottles of water in your room that hotels try to sucker you into drinking. [Full disclosure: only most hotels do this; but the Downtown Phoenix Sheraton isn’t one of them… the water in my room was complimentary! Ironically, I drank none of it and will be expensing the over-priced water I bought from the lobby gift shop.]

The obvious value for me comes from meeting new clients, partners, friends, and checking out the competition. But my recent experience in Phoenix at IFMA’s 2011 World Workplace provided me with some valuable takeaways I didn’t see coming: All of us industry professionals need to do a better job at sharing the stories, knowledge and insights we have when speaking or presenting  a topic. Most of us, me included, aren’t good enough right now. At least, not as good as we could be. Our shortcomings tend to detract from the message and fail to live up to rising attendee expectations.

So, here’s what I propose: