Check out the article in Fast Company by Ariel Schwartz on how Generation Y is driving changes in our worklives. According to Schwartz Gen Y is pushing for more sustainable offices and they also are demanding more flexible work lives including more options to work from home. The article springs from a fascinating report by Johnson Controls that explores what is needed to capture and keep younger workers.
Image: Readers Digest, Generation Y by Louise Waterson.
Piers Fawkes is the editor-in-chief and founder of PSFK, a trend forecasting company that throws a very broad net. Check out their site and you’ll find stories on everything from design (David Trubridge’s lighting) through to marketing (capturing young car buyers in the auto industry). Fawkes talks here about our work lives, cell phone apps, Cloud technology, telecommuting and his own work habits.
As a forecaster how do you see the future of work? Will more of us be working from home? Telecommuting seems to be here to stay but how will it grow? The opportunity to tele-commute or work separately has been around for a long time now but we still are living in cities and working in offices. Cities and offices and cafes are where ideas get created by people coming together and reacting to one another. That doesn’t happen too well when people are apart. Sure a few people can work well in the woods but I believe that the rest of us need the energy of gathering to foster our creativity.
Saying that, Cloud technology allows us to work on a speed and scale that we haven’t been able to before. Even simple tools like Google Docs allows us to work with people around the world immediately. PSFK tells its clients that we can do trends research and innovation in any market because with these web based tools we really can.
What’s an innovation that has changed the way we work today? What innovations do you see on the horizon that will change the way we work over the next decade? I think ambient lifestreaming will evolve and impact the workplace. Right now there’s an incredible amount of information about ourselves that we’re volunteering both consciously and subconsciously (and of course without our knowledge). We’re seeing a lot of services and applications that allow us to visualize this data and the next step is to use it. For example, I have an App on my phone that monitors my sleep through the microphone on my phone and gives me a nice visual (Owl) – but that’s as far as it takes it. You can imagine that a similar app could measure my stress at work. What these applications will soon do is give me options to share personal data with services like Google Health or my building to get medical advice or just the heating turned down.
You come across fascinating people in your work. Tell us about the most interesting person you’ve met this year. Everyone who is speaking at my event PSFK Conference NYC on April 9. I know of so many innovators but these really are the cream of the crop. (Click here for the full list of names).
PSFK started with your blog in 2004 where you collected ideas you found interesting. Can you tell us how PSFK has developed? PSFK.com is a daily ideas site. We publish up to 30 times a day on an array of subjects from art to business, from cars to tech. It was launched in June 2004. PSFK began as my personal project when I moved from London to New. My first collaborator was Simon King and I mixed his initials with mine to name the site. Over time the site became popular as more content was published on a wide array of subjects by contributors from around the world.
In the summer of 2005, PSFK was first commissioned to provide advice to Anheuser Busch about trends in Europe. Our consultancy business has since grown and recently we today we are working Apple, BMW, Pepsi and Target.
In March 2007 in New York, I started the first of a series of conferences to bring to life the conversations that were taking place on the site. Since then, PSFK Conferences have taken place in London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Singapore. In late 2008, PSFK created the Good Ideas Salons as intimate forums around single topics. These salons are run by PSFK and friends across the globe.
Then in January 2009, PSFK launched the Purple List network of experts to help introduce corporations and creative service organizations to innovation and research freelancers. At the end of 2009, with growth in staff to 10 full time, we moved to a new office on Broome Street in SoHo.
Do you still find your work spilling over to your home? Where do you work when you work at home? Before the move to the office space in Soho we worked over at a loft space on Broadway. In 2006 I borrowed a desk at the ad agency ‘Anomaly’ while I was working on PSFK which then was just a project. Surrounded by creative and entrepreneurial spirit my business took off and we grew seat by seat until they ran out of seats. I work a lot from home. I start work between 6.30 and 7 at my dinner table and work through to about 10.30. It’s the time I do research. I don’t check email, I don’t take calls, I scan 1,100 RSS feeds for the latest news. I do get distracted occasionally and play with my son and daughter Cy and Georgeanna.
What are you reading? A few chapters into the Happiness Project. Checking into Box Bottle Bag a bit. Sort of half way through Linchpin. Completed PSFK’s Good Ideas for 2010 book.
Where do you see PSFK in 5 years? Educator, retailer, charity, events space, VC fund, bar.
Images: Catalina Kulczar-Marin
TED just finished up and for all of us who didn’t get to attend (and that was a lot of us) the foundation is slowly rolling the talks out. There’s a lot of talks and I’m always overwhelmed at where to start. GOOD has published a very handy Top 10 that includes a fascinating talk from Bill Gates on the importance of innovating so we get to zero carbon emissions. He’s smart, clear and concise and this is also something that we think a lot about at Herman Miller (see our “Zero is Hero” video to get an idea of where the company is heading).
Here’s our weekly round up of must-see sites:
1. BBC News You’re wondering why I’ve included a news site? Well they have an excellent section called Day in Pictures that collects really striking images from around the globe. Where to start: Today is pretty cool (Feb 19) – you’ll get floods in Indonesia, the start of Fashion Week in London and rebuilding in Haiti.
2. W Magazine Another left of centre choice but the home tours on W’s fashion site are wonderful. They are as opulent and fabulous as the fashion covered in the magazine. Where to start: I love the Marquess of Bute’s estate in Scotland. Now that’s a home office.
3. Inhabitat Great green design news. Where to start: Their interiors section – this clamp lamp would make a great desk light.
4. Living Etc If it’s good enough for Apartment Therapy’s Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan it’s good enough for us. In a recent interview with Lifework Maxwell mentioned this British interiors magazine as a great source of inspiration. Where to start: The excellent photo galleries. Here’s the home office gallery.
5. Material Girls Put together by 5 designers it’s loaded with great images and well-researched reads on design. Where to start: A great post on desk chairs.
Virginia Heffernan has a great column in the New York Times Magazine called The Medium where she explores Internet culture. Her latest column struck a chord as it looks at working from home, particularly from a woman’s point of view. She sings the praises of telecommuting – ”this time in a feminist key.” She argues that women have benefitted even more than men from telecommuting as it enables them to more easily juggle their workloads. We’d love you to weigh in on this argument. Let me know what you think. You can email me directly at cerentha_harris@hermanmiller.com.
The Washington Post ran an interesting story on the growth of home offices. Michael Gibbs is an illustrator and his wife, Hope Katz Gibbs, owns a public relations firm. They both work from home. So when they went looking for a new house their number one priority was a flexible interior that could accommodate two home offices. The answer to their dreams? An open plan ranch house in Arlington that they can divide up easily. The Gibbs’ are not unusual – 2.5 million workers in America say their home is their primary workplace (American Time Use Survey).
Designer Shelly Klein chose an Eames Elliptical table for her living room. Via Design*Sponge
Everyone puts their feet on the coffee table – whether we admit it or not! When you’re working from the couch where else are you going to put your feet? Here are five hard working coffee tables that can take a little foot action. It’s also a great time of year to consider a big purchase – take advantage of all those sales!
1. Elliptical table by Ray and Charles Eames for Herman Miller. It comes in black or white and it may sound counterintuitive but white is a better choice here as it doesn’t show marks like the black one (I’ve got a white one and seven years of hard use – including kids jumping on it – has left only the normal signs of wear and tear.)
2. Room & Board’s Bradshaw table. This is a great sturdy choice if you are looking for something circular with a midcentury modern aesthetic.
3. Herman Miller’s Nelson Platform bench. George Nelson designed this versatile piece of furniture in 1946 and the crisp timber lines still look great today.
4. The Barbarella table. The clever designers at Blu Dot produced this thoroughly modern take on the coffee table.
5. DWR’s clean-lined Cubo is ready for feet and also has a clever concealed storage option in the leg (it’s lined in a lovely red leather).
The Manhattan Beach home Grant Kirkpatrick shares with his wife and two children.
The Los Angeles Times recently ran a short piece on the growth of home offices. Apparently walk-in closets and spa-like bathrooms are out – work spaces are in. The story focuses on Southern California so you’ll notice lots of open airy spaces like the one above. Manhattan Beach architect Grant Kirkpatrick shares this home with his wife Shaya and their children. He designed over-sized folding doors to open the room up to their front courtyard.