The Making of Minds At Work.
Posted: 09.03.09
By Kimball Office Social Media Team

You might have heard our good news about Kimball Office, Formway Design and Alt Group winning a Red Dot “Best of the Best” design award for our book, Minds At Work. We’re thrilled with the accolade, but we thought you might like to know a little more about the book itself…and why we wrote it.

To that end, we talked to Alt Group, our communications partner, about how Minds At Work. came to life.

KO: First things first, how did the idea come about? Why a book?

AG: The intent was to provide evidence of the investigation, exploration and design process that led to the development of the product Hum. Minds at Work. Alt worked alongside the Formway design team, and later the Kimball Office team, from the initial briefing through to the final design and product launch. As it is with any development process, once the final product is complete, the record and evidence of the process can be filed, stored or even lost. The importance of the book was to give people outside the project an understanding of how and why the product was developed and where our insights came from.

The book was designed to function as a tool for facility managers, human resource managers, architects and designers charged with the task of creating and maintaining high performance workplaces. Its role as a communication piece is to provide evidence of the investigation, exploration and design process that led to the development of the product. This is an entirely pioneering case of evidence-led design.

KO: Why tackle this project now – what makes this research necessary today?

AG: Design doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Design is at its best when it is user-centered. Observational, ethnographic and ‘voice of the customer’ research lead us to a fundamental question firmly rooted in the contemporary workplace: Furniture has always been designed to fit 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.

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…