Knoll Participates in WorkTech West Coast and Chicago Ideas Week

Represented by Tracy Wymer, Vice President of Workplace Strategy, Knoll participated in two recent events that focused on the intersection of workplace and public space.

At Chicago Ideas Week 2016, which took place between October 17 and 23, Barry Richards of the Rockwell Group presented a talk on the impact of urban growth on the contemporary work experience. Positing the emergence of a new workplace paradigm that fuses theater, play, and hospitality, Richards and Wymer led a workshop that interrogated the ways in which the performance of work in public spaces might be further enriched. The workshop took place in a suitably theatrical space—the Amphitheater of the historic Merchandise Mart. The themes of hospitality, performance, and improvisation that were explored during the session form the basis of Rockwell Unscripted, an upcoming workplace collection from Knoll and the Rockwell Group.

At WorkTech West Coast, which was held at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on October 25, Wymer joined Bryan Shiles of architecture firm WRNS Studio and Danielle Lucas, a student at Stanford University to speak in a panel titled “Where Public Space Meets Workplace.” Discussing the permeation of work into the public realm and its resulting effect on urban environments, the panel took a human-centric look at POPOS, or Privately Owned Public Open Space.

Building on ideas presented in a recent white paper from Knoll, the events examined the shifting boundaries of the modern workplace—once a distinctly separated sphere of human activity, now an increasingly immersive and constantly evolving area of life.