Office Insight Features Knoll Research on Immersive Planning

A March 2017 issue of the weekly digital workplace design and furniture magazine Office Insight featured new Knoll research on the growth of the sharing economy and the subsequent need for experience-based planning approaches. Citing a recently published white paper from Knoll and speaking to Kylie Roth, Knoll Senior Director of Workplace Research, Office Insight outlined the emergence and implications of immersive environments that have come to pervade the arenas of both work and life.

“The office is not just a container, or a collection of containers, anymore,” said Roth, speaking to Office Insight. “Things are more fluid, they don’t start and stop as much as they did. Activity-based planning doesn’t talk about the journey between spaces.”

The alternative approach, dubbed Immersive Planning, takes into account the more improvisational pace of work today. Presenting a paradigm of workplace design that favors communal experiences over individual ones, Immersive Planning presents shared space as the new cornerstone of the contemporary office.

In addition, “the workplace has to, and has been, looking to other industries for direction—the hospitality, residential, and airline industries in particular,” said Roth. Citing the newest workplace collection from Knoll, Rockwell Unscripted, the article highlights the growing need for more holistic, textured planning schemes, in which the “total environment outshines any one particular work element.”

With Rockwell Unscripted, Roth explained, “there are many open-ended boundaries within the collection that point to fluidity.” And as co-working spaces and collaborative work quickly become norm, the ability of the office to offer flexibility, mobility, and community is more important than ever.

Read the full article here.