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Recent Healthy Building Conference - Syracuse

Reducing Waste Through Intelligent Building Product Design This Wednesday, at the SyracuseCoE Opportunity Exchange at Healthy Buildings 2009, Sharad Mathur of Inscape Corporation noted that population is an increasingly growing problem. For example, today’s modern individuals consume fifty kilograms of meat a year, when they used to consume five kilograms of meat a year, and astronauts can now view two monuments from space: the Great Wall of China, and the landfill in New York City. Society now easily replaces and discards items that are only a few years old, posing a threat for our future. This was the premise of Mathur’s presentation, “Intelligent Building Product Design” – that we are very wasteful. As vice president of Inscape Corporation, he believes that simply changing cabinet doors, repainting, changing handles, and remodeling office space is much wiser that completely scrapping the old with the new. Mathur and Inscape Corporation advocate that remodeling old products is much ...
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The New Planning Paradigm

The New Planning Paradigm Over the last few decades there has been constant rethinking and changes in the way offices are designed. The changes have been quite significantly affected by changing demographics, real estate trends, technology and the shrinking globe. Today, we are presenting the latest trends in this ever changing office design concept as seen through our eyes. Today’s office looks different than ever before as it is a blend of the old and familiar with the new and ever changing. Today more than ever the need for flexible and chameleon office interior components are essential to prevent rapidly dated spaces. The need includes flexible furniture solutions which include space division, storage and worksurfaces that can easily morph aesthetically and functionally to cater to the new planning paradigms emerging continuously. The only constant we live with is change, change and more change. Diverse Workforce The North American workforce in the 60’s and 70’s was primarily White...
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Workplace Trends

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The evolving workplaces of today are influenced by the architecture, business environment, Science and technological developments and the cultural trends in society. I coin these the ABC'S of Workplace trends. A - Architecture B - Business C - Culture S - Science The changes have evolved by inventions such as the Elevator to the oil crisis during the gulf wars to the changes in Internet and PC technology. The corner surface which housed the huge computer monitors of the 90's and early 2000's have been replaced with the sleek and light flat screens of today. Multiple monitors required a lot of thought and space for traders, engineers or research scientists. Today we can mount multiple monitors on a single monitor arm which could mount to your desk or panel. Wireless technology and lap-tops with eight hour battery lives are making corporations rethink their workstation designs. Perhaps environmental consciousness is driving more and more businesses towards responsible use ...
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The George Nelson Desk

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Emergence of Systems Furniture in the 60's

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The office was still an evolving concept in the early 60's where corporations were struggling with a common face for their offices. They typically hired local firms to design offices that were either plush or conservative based on the personality of the local manager. The typical office was created as a series of closed rooms occupied by managers or staff; a single room for a manager and a shared room for secretarial and administrative workers. The issues noticed within these kinds of office environments was that no room for growth within departments was built in. Which meant that if a new manager was added in purchasing, he could be located in a room that was on the other end of the office or literally on a different floor or building. The inefficiencies of working in these offices began from the low communication, duplication of tasks and lack of collaboration between people working within departments. The 1960's saw the rise of a new concept for office design by the Quickbor...
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Thought Starters

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Concepts of Space

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Structures and space have always been corner stones of man's endless creation of culture, religion, science and change. The concept of space has always been a physical model of mans inner beliefs and faith. Ancient schools of design followed sciences like Vaastu and Feng Shui to plan different spaces including towns, palaces, temples and residences. Almost all these ancient schools were focussed on the belief that the earth is the center of the solar system and that the focus is on the exterior form rather than the interior. A building denoted a message. for example the grand temples in Egypt and India showed the supremacy of the leaders and the size of the structures showed the overpowering superiority over the common smaller proportioned residences. Some of the key concepts used in different times are as follows: Ancient/ Medieval Concept - Earth Centric, Ptolemy Model •Exterior focus •Small interior space •Minimal light into interior •Space seen as finite Renaissance Concept ...
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