Promoting Collaboration Through Creative Space Design
Open floor plans are the hottest trend in office and academic building design right now. This architectural style is designed to encourage innovation and teamwork by breaking down traditional barriers and bringing people face-to-face.
The University of Chicago’s Mansueto Library with its soaring glass dome is a perfect example of a modern space intentionally designed to encourage collaboration. Open sightlines and a blend of natural materials create an environment that invites students to interact and collaborate.
The adoption of this space-conscious, free-collaboration design concept by large research universities and glamourous tech giants like Google has helped fuel the movement to change the way we work. However, an open floor plan does pose a few challenges for the modern-day interior designer.
For example, how can employers and educators foster a live-work-play environment that simultaneously fuels innovation through communication, AND incorporates “quiet areas” that allow for individual work? The solution is a flexible, open design that allows the space to shift to meet its occupants’ moment-by-moment needs.
Seamlessly transforming from a solo study space to a group work environment, collaboration pods are the new tool that many campuses, both educational and corporate, are using to upgrade dated floor plans. These areas take the idea of collaborative space one step further, providing students and colleagues with a welcoming, comfortable place to work together.
With glassboard solutions for every surface, Clarus™ provides the perfect brainstorming canvases – and with Glide™, a three-dimensional glassboard system, designers can add more writing surface into a smaller space.
Glide has stationary and sliding panels that both function as the world’s greatest writing surface – glass. The glass panels function within two parallel planes mounted to the wall – adding dimension, while also creating movement and modern style for the office and classrooms of the future.
Only a glassboard with exponential writing surface will act as an essential design piece for decades and bring collaboration and modern design to employees and students for years on end.
To learn about the solutions Glide brings to the modern office visit the first blog in the series. To learn more about Glide’s design and see the specs, visit the product page.