Tagged "hum"

  • Seen and Heard at IIDEX Canada 2009
    Posted: 09.25.09
    By Andrea Rohleder

    Our first day at IIDEX 2009 in Toronto, Canada was a blast! Student day meant that lots of young professionals scoured the show for fun finds. Just a few things we saw and heard at IIDEX:

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    Thanks for all the love on Twitter at IIDEX today! And a special thank you to @designerpages, the social media team at IIDEX, for featuring this video on the IIDEX website:

    Several visitors were interested in downloading our Kimball Office CAD symbols, viewing floor plans and renderings and seeing photos of our products – you can find all of them here on our website!

    If you’re at IIDEX, be sure to stop by to meet Fluent, Hum. Minds At Work. and our brand-new Kimball Office | Interstuhl line of luxury office seating.

    And don’t forget: You can enter to win your own Silver chair!

  • Designing Open-Plan Offices: Increasing Productivity and Collaboration
    Posted: 09.14.09
    By Kimball Office Social Media Team

    Open-plan offices. What does that really mean, anyway? Are the cubicles in Office Space considered open plan? Do open plan offices always use cubicles? Are all cubicles created equal?

    office-space

    Who better to ask than the experts: Shelly Lehner, specification support team leader and Lori Fuselier, product specifier. These two help clients go from idea to design, drawing the plans for a variety of offices all over the country.

    KO: So, why go open plan?

    SL: It’s easier to collaborate in open-plans vs. private offices. When someone is working in a private office, most people’s natural instinct is to not want to bother them.

    KO: Do certain types of organizations prefer open plan offices?

    SL: I don’t know that there’s a type of organization that prefers open plan offices. I’d say that open plan offices are pretty much standard across the board today.

    LF: I agree. Most of the projects I see have offices on the outer edges, and open plan offices in the middle.

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    KO: What do open plan workspaces look like – are they always cubicles?

    Read more…

  • Cognitive Ergonomics Part 3: Organizing Your Workspace
    Posted: 07.31.09
    By Kimball Office Social Media Team

    In our cognitive ergonomics series, you’ve learned about inattention blindness (and moonwalking bears). You’ve stared at the back of your hand (thank you!) and read passages of words that are completely misspelled. Now, let’s talk about organization. Yes, organization. That thing most of us rarely do. That task at the bottom of our to-do list…the one that, ironically, would make our to-do list seem a lot easier to tackle.

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    Let’s start with a fact: People will organize their workspace to simplify choices.

    Without much thought, we group similar things together. We offload items, getting rid of things we don’t need to eliminate decisions. We use triggers or cues to get information. We use prompts to remind us to do things.

    But why?

    Your brain has two kinds of memory: working and Read more…

  • Cognitive Ergonomics Part 2: Eyes at Work
    Posted: 07.24.09
    By Kimball Office Social Media Team

    When we last talked about cognitive ergonomics, we discussed inattention blindness, the phenomenon where focusing on one thing makes you completely miss other things, however strange (like the moonwalking bear).

    Now, I know “cognitive ergonomics” sounds really complicated. It’s not – don’t worry. You probably know what ergonomics is – it’s the science of designing a job, workplace, etc. to fit the employee. Cognitive ergonomics is the science of designing a workspace to fit the way your mind works. Basically, physical and cognitive ergonomics are two sides of the same science. And we’re most interested in making our minds work at work.

    For minds to work, they have to process information. But to process information, you have to receive it. And the way you receive it matters. The most dominant sense we use to receive information is vision. It tells us where things are. One of the most interesting things our eyes do to help us receive information is accommodate wide ranges of vision – you can see things near and far without trouble. (That is, unless you’re like me and you need glasses to even see the end of your nose!)

    Will you try something for me? Hold your Read more…

  • Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy Holds HUM See Me Screen Design Contest
    Posted: 07.22.09
    By Kimball Office Social Media Team

    Coeur d'Alene Academy

    Coeur d'Alene Academy

    Kimball Office recently hosted a See Me Screen Design Competition for professional interior designers for the HUM product line, selecting Katherine Conti, from Maryville University as the winner. But one teacher, Heather Ketchum, at the Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, decided that her high school students were up to the challenge too.

    Mrs. Ketchum’s students didn’t enter the formal competition, but as a class project, they were given the same contest criteria issued to professional designers. To kick off the contest, Bruce Nitteberg and Jodi Lizotte, from Kimball Office’s Post Falls location, hosted the high schoolers on a manufacturing plant tour and introduced them to industrial design.

    A total of 83 entries were submitted – almost 1/4 of the entire student body competed. To select winners, Read more…

  • What is Cognitive Ergomonics? Part 1
    Posted: 07.04.09
    By Kimball Office Social Media Team

    You’ve probably heard of ergonomics. You might even have an ergonomic workspace, with a chair or desk customized for your body. But what about your mind? Does your workspace affect how your brain works, like it affects how your body feels? We think so.

    Say you have a chair that’s too tall for you. You have to spend the whole day hunched over your desk, and you end up with lower back pain that prevents you from doing your job as best you can. Now, what if you had a workspace that’s perfectly suited to your body, but you’re constantly distracted with sights and sounds from coworkers? You can’t just escape and work alone to concentrate – you need to collaborate! But then again, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you have work that requires Read more…

  • Katherine Conti, See Me Screen Design Winner
    Posted: 06.16.09
    By Kimball Office Social Media Team

    Katherine Conti, a recent interior design graduate from Maryville University in St. Louis, MO made it up to the Kimball Office Chicago Showroom for our Event to show off her winning design, “Neural Nets.”

    Katherine was completely shocked to win the design competition – she submitted her application in February, and was expecting, at best, an email response from Kimball in a few months. Instead, we contacted Katherine’s professor to get her class schedule, and then arrived in March with the prototype and an oversized check and balloons, game show style.

    For our Chicago Showroom Event, we developed a full installation showcasing her winning design, and Katherine joined us to share her story and check it out for the first time in person.

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