Warmer colors like yellow and orange are found to inspire optimism and freshness. This should come as little surprise – just think about how you feel on a sunny day. So make the workplace that same sunny oasis in a collaborative space. This could include yellow stools and ottomans from Teknion or colorful carpet squares like the ones PURE just installed from Shaw Contracts and Tandus Centiva. This space will serve as the perfect gathering areas for employees, students, or volunteers to come together and create something creative, innovative, and new.
Color can have a profound impact on a person’s mood, and it is our job as designers to channel this power into an environment that cultivates hard work, creative thinking, and personal well-being. This begins with a workplace that incorporates color into the space.
Technological innovation and ever-changing ideas have become the soundtrack of our world today. And in this era, workplace design must foster this need for efficiency, flexibility, and innovation. Architectural walls seamlessly provide spaces with improved efficiency, design, and sustainability compared to their drywall counterparts.
Architectural walls contribute to both the design and function of an office. The result: a space that is both aesthetically inspiring and productivity enhancing. As an added bonus, they’re more cost-effective and environmentally friendly than traditional drywall options.
They can be 100% relocated and reused, meaning offices only face a one time cost of purchasing, versus more money and time spent on renovating, reconfiguring, or relocating offices with drywall. Installing drywall also requires a multi-step process, from framing, electricity, sheetrock, and painting, which means money and time can easily be lost during this delicate process. Architectural walls arrive already built on site and face a one-step installation process.
Teknion offers three different walling solutions, Altos, Optos, and Focus, all of which welcome natural light and retain a modern look with glass finishes, but differ in the design of the fascias that connect the glass panels. If you’re after a minimal structure with a seamless look of glass, the Optos are perfect, whereas the Altos and Focus offer metal, wooden, and aluminum fascias that create clean lines and visual interest.
Focus Walls
Optos Walls
But office design is about more than just glass cubes. Design reflects a message and serves a purpose, and this can be exercised through architectural walls. Architectural walls offers different materials, colors, and shapes to guarantee that your office will reflect your message. Whether it’s creativity through a bright color of glass, originality through a steel surface, or a unique curved shape, architectural walls can do so much more than outdated drywall.
Remember that feeling you get when the sun finally comes out after a weekend of rain. After spending a couple days hibernating in bed with whatever you’ve been binge-watching on Netflix, a surprise visit from the sun feels rejuvenating. You ditch the TV and go for a run (or maybe a walk). You finally get around to cleaning out your garage. You’re enthused with a new feeling of happiness and productivity all because of the light.
Offices face this same phenomenon. A dreary, fluorescent-lit office screams prison, and no one wants to feel like their cubicle is synonymous to a jail cell. Gloomy and dim lighting makes the workplace seem unpleasant, which can ultimately decrease employee morale and productivity. Studies have shown that improved lighting can increase productivity by 10 to 50 percent.
This improved lighting comes in two forms: ambient and task lighting. Think of ambient light as light for people, and task light as light for work. Both need to cooperate in order to achieve success.
Ambient light’s goal is to illuminate the room. The Koncept Z-Bar Pendant is a unique solution to outdated overhead lights. This customizable pendant is complete with sleek, floating bars that can be rearranged into different shapes according to your preferences. And as an added bonus, its LED lights mean you’ll capture some extra LEED points for a more eco-friendly workplace.
LED lights also have a blue base, whereas fluorescent lights are more yellow based. Blue light triggers our ganglion cells, which tell the body to wake up and stimulates alertness. Nevermind that extra cup of coffee, just turn on a few more LED lights.
The second half of a beautifully lit office is task lights. Lighting solutions like the Teknion Conflux will transform any gloomy office to a sunny oasis for employees. Complete with LED lighting for a more environmentally friendly alternative and wireless charging portals, this task light perfectly enhances workplace design and efficiency.
However, when choosing task lights it is important to avoid the dreaded cave effect. Lamps often light desks downward, which leaves the surrounding walls and floors dark. Upward facing lighting will create that open, airy office you should be striving for. Humanscale, WorkWell, and Koncept all provide innovative task lights that will reduce glare effects, enhance sustainability, and promote productivity. Think more sunshine, less rain.
So flip the switch on those dingy lights hanging above your head. You’ll feel better, work better, and maybe even look better.
Workplace design has the power to help or hinder productivity. One main facet of this is workplace acoustics. The chatter of conversations, typing of keyboards, and clicking of pens can distract employees and ultimately decrease their productivity. Studies have shown that once an employee is distracted, it can take up to 20 minutes for them to fully regain their concentration. A distracted employee is also more likely to make an error while working.
So in the day and age of open offices encouraging employees to interact more, we are deemed with the task of mitigating these negative side effects. The solution to this lies in the ABCs: absorb, block, and cover sounds.
Open offices often occupy large rooms with hard surfaces for walls, such as brick, glass, or cement. Sounds reverberate and echo off these materials, requiring softer materials to counteract these hard ones. This could come in the form of rubber flooring, carpet, or ceiling tiles. These materials absorb any noise pollutants and diminish the negative side effects of an open office.
Wall partitions can also be used to block sounds. Open office spaces are perfect for increasing employee interaction and cooperation, but wall partitions can create that necessary private, quiet space for a distraction-free zone. Altos, Optos, and Focus are all architectural glass wall systems that allow for the customization of offices to facilitate acoustics and design.
To cover the noise, air conditioners, heaters, or sound systems will all do the trick. The Lencore White Noise System achieves speech privacy via a spectrum of ambient background noise which masks conversation, keyboard clicking, and other distractions. This white noise combines every frequency of sound, much like the color white combines every shade of the rainbow, to create a symphony of sounds that make it impossible to be distracted by any other audible sound.
Stéphane Pigeon, an engineer of natural soundscapes, travels the world collecting new sounds like waterfalls, wind blowing, or insects (yes, such a job does exist). In doing this, Pigeon is designing white noise out of natural phenomenon with the goal of reducing stress, increasing focus, and improving learning.
So keep the open office design, but remember the final touch: workplace acoustics. No one wants to listen to your clicking pen or chatter about what you made for dinner last night while they’re trying to fill out an expense report.