This is about organisational behaviour and cultures. About social dynamics and networks. About space, design and architecture. And all the rest.
By far the most popular blog post I’ve written on this site with more than 6,500 views to date (and counting) was written more than ten years ago, in 2014, on the topic of office configurations that support different forms of sociability. In ‘Figures, doors and passages – revisited. Or: Does your office allow for…
Combining the analysis of spatial layouts with the study of social relations flourishing within different buildings for work (offices, hospitals, schools, universities, laboratories and so on) has been one of my core research interests for decades now, ever since the publication of my PhD on ‘The Space-Organisation Relationship’ back in 2010. Both dimensions – spatial…
You may know that feeling: you’ve attended an event, chatted with lots of interesting people, you’ve gone home and the next day you continue with your day-to-day work, more often than not forgetting those conversations and your new contacts quickly again. But sometimes, just sometimes things happen afterwards, you follow up, or your contact follows…
In this post, Julie Zook and I sit down to discuss some key headlines of our recent co-edited book, The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture, which was published open access with UCL Press on 22 March 22. Health as social, hospitals as social We conceived The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture in late 2019, just…
You will know by now that I am a Harry Potter fan. If not, go and read my piece on Hogwarts and how the school building influences teaching and learning practices. But today I don’t want to speak about schools. I want to talk about flexible workspace. One of Rowling’s brilliant ideas is the Room…
Joanne K Rowling is a genius for many reasons. The world of Harry Potter that she has created is fascinating for adults and children alike. It is also a world that has become the subject of research – there is an annual Harry Potter Conference in Philadelphia, where literature scholars debate the paternal atonement of…
Knowledge is a funny thing. A lot of people would agree that a firm’s competitive advantage in today’s business world is based on knowledge generation and transfer. Often the word ‘flow’ is used. But how something abstract like knowledge could flow (like water down a river) or be transferred (like money) isn’t quite as clear. Some scholars…
While I normally write about space and buildings and how they are used, I want to blog about blogging today. More specifically on getting students to blog. There is a lot of interest in academic blogging, so it’s time we think about starting the next generation of academics – our students – early and get them to…
A couple of weeks ago, floor plan and seating arrangements of the 250 people running the General Election campaign for the Labour party were revealed in the Guardian. The article outlined teams and their tasks, where they all sat and how the war room operated on a day-to-day basis. It is a fascinating account of life inside a…
A lot of my architecture friends got all excited this week by the completion of the new Learning Hub of Nanyang Technical University in Singapore by Heatherwick Studio. Quite rightly so! It seems to be an amazing building – made up of twelve stacked towers arranged around a central courtyard, allowing views up, down and…