This Earthquake-Proof Desk can Easily Shrug Off a 2,000 Pound Block

by officePROhub.com on 01/20/2012 - 07:03 pm

Tag: Office Furniture

I don't live in a high risk area for deadly tremors, but after watching this earthquake-proof table easily survive having a 2,200 pound block dropped on it, I think I still want one for my office—just in case.

 

The table was designed by Ido Bruno and Arthur Brutter primarily for use in schools. Students are typically taught to hide under their desks in the event of an earthquake, but most desks aren't designed to support the weight of all the debris were the building to collapse. Which is clearly demonstrated in this video when they drop just a 1,000 pound weight on a traditional desk and it's immediately pancaked.

 

 

In addition to providing a safe haven for students, the desk's supporting structure is designed in such a way that it also provides several escape routes depending on how debris has fallen. It's also light enough to be lifted by just two students, and is built with durable but inexpensive materials so it's actually affordable for a school to purchase en masse. Now it's not available just yet, but based on these tests being conducted at the Structural Engineering department at Padua University in Italy, it shouldn't have much trouble getting approved for sale. [designboom]

Swedish stationer takes global path

by officePROhub.com on 01/17/2012 - 12:38 am

Tag: Stationery

 

Posted Date: 16/01/2012

By Inside Retail

Ikea and H&M are not the only innovative Scandinavian retailers making their mark around the world.

Stationery chain Ordning & Reda, originally founded in Sweden and now a a subsidiary of Denmark's Bodum, may not have quite the same household brand awareness as their giant neighbours, but their eye-catching store design is winning friends far from home.

Since mid-September last year, the company has opened four new outlets and its online store is set to open any day.

The new stores have opened in Johannesburg, South Africa, Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport (pictured below; its ifrst dedicated airport store), Rome and Prague.

Ordning & Reda's existing stores are all located centrally in big cities. But while each store has uniform decor and expression, reflecting the “simple” style the brand is renowned for, each store also has its own local characteristic, adapted to the market and the specific location.

Lars Moller Nielsen, MD, of Ordning & Reda, says the Rome store (above) is located in one of the older parts of the city, so the shop has bowed walls and uneven floors. In contrast, the Prague store (below) is in a brand new modern shopping centre with bright lighting and high ceilings.

Nielsen always takes a personal interest in the design and decor of each new store opened. This is partly so that he can be well acquainted with the new stores, but it is also part of the chain's overall strategy for shop design, which is clearly easier to implement if a single central person is part of the process every time.

For its first airport store, the chain formed a franchise partnership with NK Stockholm opened its first own store at Arlanda.

"In the future, Ordning & Reda wants to open more own stores at locations such as airports or popular tourist attractions such as Tivoli, where we have had a store since April,” says Nielsen. “As a designer chain, we want to locate at sites where customers expect to find us. Either because they want to buy a gift to take home, or because they want to treat themselves with some special design."

  

Ordning & Reda is growing and looking to increase its store numbers further - but Nielsen says the company is very selective with regard to location.

"We don't want to spread ourselves too much; we'd rather concentrate on having our own stores in good cities with the right customer-base and then supplement with locations such as airports. Furthermore we're looking to have Ordning & Reda outlets as a shop-in-shop concept, similar to the outlet we have in the Magasin department store in Copenhagen. We are currently negotiating with promising chains of department stores in Canada, Switzerland and France."

He believes that strategy will underpin Ordning & Reda’s brand image as “an affordable, honest, and reliable luxury brand”.

Above is one of the chain's older stores, in Stockholm, photographed during the 2011 Westfield World Retail Study Tour.  

Meanwhile, the new online store has been designed to make the brand's goods accessible by people in countries where there are not yet Ordning & Reda stores.

Today the chain has more than 40 outlets in 14 countries throughout the world.

Restoring the wartime birthplace of the modern computer

by officePROhub.com on 01/17/2012 - 12:58 am

Tag: Office Computers

 

elizabeth renzetti  BLETCHLEY, ENGLAND— From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

PublishedMonday, Jan. 16, 2012 7:07PM EST  Last updatedMonday, Jan. 16, 2012 7:10PM EST

 

The paint is peeling on the low wooden huts, their foundations cracked, their eavestroughs broken and mossy. Blue tarpaulins flutter on the roofs, offering scant protection from England’s notoriously changeable weather.

 

It may seem like a ramshackle holiday camp, but this is the place where the famed mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing and his code-breaking colleagues laboured to bring an end to the Second World War, and by some estimates shortened it by two years. It’s not a derelict housing estate but the birthplace of the modern computer. Bletchley Park, one of the most important historical sites in Britain, is finally struggling back from ruin.

 

After decades of neglect, there's been a resurgence of interest in Bletchley, with visitor numbers rising to 150,000 this year. For years it received no government funds, but a recent grant of ₤5-million from the British Heritage Lottery Fund and ₤500,000 from Google have brought the park close to its ₤7.5-million renovation goal.

 

It could have been worse: This estate – where code breakers such as Turing, Mavis Batey and Dilly Knox once worked feverishly to decipher German messages with pencil and paper, and then with early computers – was nearly razed to make way for a supermarket in the early 1990s. For five decades after the war’s end, a government policy of hiding its intelligence capabilities, combined with the awe-inspiring ability of its 8,000 wartime employees to keep completely silent about the work they’d done at Bletchley, meant that nobody really knew what happened on this country estate 80 kilometres northwest of London. It was left to crumble, and its memories with it.

 

“The work done at Bletchley made a huge difference during the war, and had an enormous impact after,” says Simon Greenish, director of the Bletchley Park Trust, who is heading the restoration effort. “To lose all that history would be insane.”

 

Last month, Google announced a donation of £500,000 ($780,000), inspired by the rebuilding of Colossus in 2007, the proto-computer used by Bletchley to break Germany’s seemingly impregnable Lorenz cipher. “Google recognized that this is the site where the modern world we all inhabit got started,” Mr. Greenish says. “The first computer to actually do something was Colossus.”

 

What it did, in part, was make D-Day possible by decoding German messages that showed the Nazis had swallowed the Allies’ deception about the invasion landing site. You can see the rebuilt Colossus – giant, clattering, blasting with heat – tucked away in a part of Bletchley that’s already been refurbished, and renamed the National Museum of Computing.

 

But it’s the story of almost surreal human effort that continues to fascinate. For six years, young people – they were almost always in their early twenties – worked 24 hours a day in eight-hour shifts to crack the Enigma code used by the German army, navy and air force (as well as encrypted messages from Italy and Japan). They worked in dim, draughty, makeshift huts that weren’t in much better shape then than they are now. Crucially, they spoke to no one about their work – not even each other.

 

Bletchley, once a country estate, lies equidistant between Cambridge and Oxford universities, and many of its code breakers were drawn from the mathematics departments of those two schools. But the intelligence service also drafted chess champions, students of German, women who were good at crosswords and historians.

 

One of those historians was Asa Briggs, who was recruited from the army signal corps because he’d invented a secret language as a child, and thus showed an aptitude for puzzles. The privations of working at the park, the long hours and uncomfortable lodgings, meant little: “We had a sense of common purpose,” says Lord Briggs, who has just written a memoir about his time at Bletchley, called Secret Days. “We were engaged as a team in doing something that was absolutely essential to winning the war.”

 

Some members of the team would become more celebrated than others. Many of those were deeply eccentric, or as one female code breaker put it in Sinclair McKay’s book The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, “they were quite mad, some of them, quite potty, but very, very sweet.” Angus Wilson, who would become a noted novelist, once leapt fully clothed into Bletchley’s pond in a fit of frustration. Mr. Turing, Cambridge’s great mathematician, rode his bike around the park wearing a gas mask. In Hut 8, where the cryptographers worked on naval Enigma, there’s a replica of his office, complete with a mug chained to a radiator; he didn’t like to share his things.

 

Mr. Turing was broken in the postwar period, hounded to suicide in 1954 after standing trial for homosexual activities. The British government has since apologized to him, and a stamp was recently issued in his honour. This year marks the centenary of his birth in June, and Bletchley plans a special exhibit to commemorate his work.

 

For the lesser-known code breakers, who are all in their late eighties or nineties, the restored park will be a memorial to their secret toil. This is the most astonishing part of the story: Husbands and wives who worked together at Bletchley never spoke to each other about what they did, even long after they’d left; fathers went to their graves not knowing of their children’s war efforts. Only in 1974, with the publication of Frederick Winterbotham’s book The Ultra Secret, was the silence finally broken – even then, many code breakers kept mum.

 

“We were not keeping secrets because we’d signed the Official Secrets Act,” Lord Briggs says. “We were keeping secrets because we realized that if our activities at Bletchley were known it would be very deleterious to winning the war, and we all wanted to win the war.”

 

As part of the restoration plan, the surviving code breakers’ stories are all being recorded. At a gathering of Bletchley veterans two years ago, Simon Greenish was moved to hear what price they’d paid for their silence: “Some of them said they couldn’t get jobs after the war because they had no CVs, and they couldn’t tell people what they’d been doing. So they ended up with worse jobs than they should have done, or no jobs at all. But they weren’t bitter. They just regarded it as one of life’s little trials.”

 

Mr. Greenish hopes that the refurbishment of all the buildings will be finished by 2014, including a new visitor centre to welcome upwards of 250,000 guests each year (compared with 150,000 now). The point, he says, is to preserve “the historical integrity” of what were always quite ramshackle buildings – not to make them any more elaborate, but to stop the rot.

 

The trust hopes to reach its fundraising goal by Easter, thanks to a grant of ₤5-million from Britain’s Heritage Lottery Fund, the first major injection of public money toward the restoration. “The site’s now in relatively good order, especially compared to what it was,” Mr. Greenish says. “And I think we’re fairly solid for the future.”

'Business lounges' set to open in Shell petrol stations in Europe

by officePROhub.com on 01/16/2012 - 12:51 am

Tag: Serviced Office Space

 

The serviced office group Regus has struck a deal with the oil giant Shell that could see its business lounges opened on petrol forecourts across Europe.

Targeting business people on the road, the first outlet has opened at a Shell station near Paris. It means that workers can take advantage of fast internet access, copy documents or arrange courier deliveries at the same time as filling up on fuel.

Regus already has 1,200 offices in 550 cities, but this agreement helps to expand its reach across the transport network. Its business stations are being used by entrepreneurs as a base to start up new ventures, as well as larger firms that have switched some of their staff to mobile working to save money.

"This alliance allows Shell and Regus as market leaders in their respective fields to come together to better serve our customers," said Istvan Kapitany, Shell's vice-president of retail in Europe.

Mark Dixon, founder and chief executive of Regus, believes the move will cater for workers on the move who still need a place to draw breath. "Though they communicate and work using smartphones, tablets and laptops, they miss access to a professional place to work, meet or think where there is easy access to state-of-the-art business facilities," he said. "By opening Regus business lounges at motorway stations, Shell and Regus are bringing vibrant business hubs right to the roadside."

'Business lounges' set to open in Shell petrol stations in Europe

by officePROhub.com on 01/16/2012 - 12:51 am

Tag: Serviced Office Space

 

The serviced office group Regus has struck a deal with the oil giant Shell that could see its business lounges opened on petrol forecourts across Europe.

Targeting business people on the road, the first outlet has opened at a Shell station near Paris. It means that workers can take advantage of fast internet access, copy documents or arrange courier deliveries at the same time as filling up on fuel.

Regus already has 1,200 offices in 550 cities, but this agreement helps to expand its reach across the transport network. Its business stations are being used by entrepreneurs as a base to start up new ventures, as well as larger firms that have switched some of their staff to mobile working to save money.

"This alliance allows Shell and Regus as market leaders in their respective fields to come together to better serve our customers," said Istvan Kapitany, Shell's vice-president of retail in Europe.

Mark Dixon, founder and chief executive of Regus, believes the move will cater for workers on the move who still need a place to draw breath. "Though they communicate and work using smartphones, tablets and laptops, they miss access to a professional place to work, meet or think where there is easy access to state-of-the-art business facilities," he said. "By opening Regus business lounges at motorway stations, Shell and Regus are bringing vibrant business hubs right to the roadside."

Proactive employers encourage workers to get out of seats

by officePROhub.com on 01/16/2012 - 11:50 pm

Tags: Office Furniture, Treadmill Desks

John Stucke The Spokesman-Review

 

A few years ago Jenni Lindsey waited with dread to board a rollercoaster at Silverwood Theme Park.

It wasn’t because of the stomach-churning drops: Lindsey worried about fitting into one of the rollercoaster’s seats.

“I was mortified,” she said. “Some people wonder if they’re going to get vertigo or throw up. I was scared they would kick me off their rollercoaster because I was too big.”

That was several years and 91 pounds ago. Lindsey undertook a series of small, daily changes to her life that helped her shed weight and stave off diabetes. She enrolled in Weight Watchers, began to take walks and started exercising.

Perhaps the most important change she undertook, however, was getting out of her desk chair at work and spending several hours a day at a standing work station.

For all the time, effort and money spent on appetite suppressants, fad diets and squeezing in brief workouts, research is coalescing around the simple idea that standing, rather than sitting, for most of your waking hours is critical to better health, brain function and productivity.

“So much of my day is spent at work that being able to stand and walk more, I think, made it possible for me (to lose weight),” Lindsey said.

The issue of standing vs. sitting has been studied extensively. The American College of Sports Medicine published an article entitled “Medical Hazards of Prolonged Sitting.” The venerable Mayo Clinic offers unsettling research findings that explain the dangers of sedentary physiology. The American Cancer Society found that sitting too much cuts life expectancy.

And author John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist and professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, says in a best-selling book, “Brain Rules,” that humans evolved and our brains developed while walking about a dozen miles a day.

“The brain still craves that experience, especially in sedentary populations like our own. … Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in long-term memory, reasoning, attention and problem-solving tasks,” according to Medina.These ideas are now, albeit slowly, being deployed in some workplaces, including Avista Corp., law offices, call centers, clinics and hospitals, where the special desks enable – even require – workers to climb out of their chairs and get onto their feet, said Craig Smith, director of physical therapy at Group Health Cooperative.

“If you’re chained to a chair at work, figure out how to get up and out of it – often,” he said.

 

Pilot program for treadmill desks

Lindsey’s weight gain came about quickly.

She had a daughter, and the resulting life and schedule changes led to a job change. She left her work in a LensCrafters lab where she spent most of her time standing and took a job with Pitney Bowes, the office equipment corporation that has a large call center in Spokane.

Lindsey, now 39, also sustained a couple of injuries that limited her mobility and made it harder for her to take part in sports she enjoyed, such as softball.

Pinned to her desk for eight hours a day and overeating, Lindsey tumbled into poor health.

“I was emotionally exhausted when I went home,” she said. “I didn’t have anything left for my daughter.

“The whole thing was just so hard, and I didn’t know where to start.”

Then, about three years ago, she read about a workplace pilot program.

Pitney Bowes wanted a handful of employees to try out new desks for several hours a day, five days a week. The desks were built on treadmills set to run about 1 to 2 miles per hour – a slow, steady pace.

Sharon Reynolds, an advanced nurse practitioner who runs the wellness center at the call center, said the employees participating in the pilot have demonstrated the merit of being active at work.

Employees lost weight and some even lowered their blood sugar levels.

Though standing work stations remain unorthodox in the American workplace, Reynolds believes the four in the Pitney Bowes office – each costing more than $4,000 – contributed to an overall healthier lifestyle for employees and boosted their productivity. The treadmill desks have become so popular that employees now can be assigned to one for an hour a day.

“The walk stations turned out to be a sort of tipping point for them,” said Reynolds.

She’s unsure if more such desks will be purchased, but the evidence points to standing stations producing healthier, more productive employees, Reynolds said.

 

The ‘inertia trap’

Standing desks have earned some humorous notoriety.

Fans of the NBC comedy “The Office” may recall character Dwight Schrute at his new standing desk expressing disgust toward his seated co-workers: “Every second you sit there is an hour off your life,” he says. “Look at all of you; I feel like you’re in a suicide cult.”

Evidence of the superiority of standing is just one piece of the weight-loss puzzle, which researchers have been trying to solve since long before the World Health Organization declared a global obesity epidemic in 1997.

In Spokane, for example, nearly one in three people are obese and the numbers continue to rise. The obesity rate here is higher than the rates in Washington state and nationally.

Recent studies have found that even people who run miles every day or attend aerobics classes are at increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and some cancers if they spend most of the rest of their day sitting.

Researchers say it’s about more than simple caloric burn.

Muscles produce beneficial enzymes called lipoprotein lipase. They help the body process fats. When muscles are flexed and used, even in low-intensity ways such as standing or fidgeting, lipoprotein lipase is produced.

When people sit, many of their larger leg muscles stop working and thus stop producing the enzyme.

In a 2010 study published by the American Journal of Epidemiology, researchers linked prolonged sitting with a higher risk of death, regardless of physical activity.

The findings were startling enough that study leader Alpa Patel advocates public health messages to encourage less time sitting along with advocating physical activity.

Much of the focus must be on the workplace, said Smith, of Group Health.

“It’s an inertia trap,” he said. “Think about an eight-hour day of someone in customer service: They’re on the phone and on the computer.

“The ads on television say be active one hour a day. That’s pointing at minimalist activity, but it’s a starting point. If we told people what they really should be doing, they would say, ‘That’s too hard, I’m not doing that.’ ”

People should take many small breaks, moving and stretching about once every 15 minutes, Smith said. It would be optimal if people walked about 12 miles every day, which means that they would spend more hours on their feet.

Lindsey said being active at work has rewarded her employer with better work and helps her be more active at home.

“I used to go home just dead on my feet,” she said. “Now I have lots more energy.”