Knoll Participates in CoreNet Global Summit in Philadelphia

On October 18, Kylie Roth, Senior Director of Workplace Research at Knoll, presented a two-part session at the 2016 CoreNet Global Summit in Philadelphia. Titled "Building the Future of Work in the Information Age," the session began with a discussion of the experience-based workplace, in which evolving working styles and the flow of information are given greater priority. Leading the event with Shawna E. Doerksen, PhD, an independent consultant and co-founder of SDC Insights, Roth presented recent research from Knoll to suggest that the future workplace must be flexible enough to "allow users to define their own path."

"The workplace must stay in stride with today’s work and workers," Roth said, accounting for the growing emergence of new planning paradigms in contemporary office design. The workplace must respond to new forms of working that have been encouraged by virtual connectivity—Doerksen corroborated that "in the next 5 years unassigned space [in the office] is expected to nearly triple." This will invariably result in new conceptions of shared space at work, facilitated further by the "the continued growth of group-based work and the need for spaces to engage people and make them feel connected to each other and the organization," Roth said.

In response, organizations are reorienting their environments to adopt a more casual appearance, increasingly mirroring hospitality and residential design. To illustrate this approach, an interactive workshop allowed participants to use visual aids to articulate their business challenges, map out present-day workplace issues, and envision new user experiences. In small groups, they built, planned, and critiqued their future workplace models.

The impact of an immersive, experience-focused workplace is valuable not simply for its space planning benefits, but for its ability to instill a sense of wellbeing and enthusiasm in workers. "People want to feel proud to walk through the doors in the morning," Roth explained. "An environment designed with purpose and aligned with the company’s mission and brand can inspire people."

Participants use visual aids to design and map out future workplace models at the 2016 CoreNet Global Summit in Philadelphia.

The CoreNet Global Summit, Americas is one of three summits that CoreNet Global holds annually. Each summit provides networking, training and educational programming for hundreds of corporate real estate professionals in a range of industries and sectors. In addition to the session, Knoll also partnered with Collier International on a booth at the conference.