Michael Kanoza, a product graphics analyst in special visual collaboration department talked about Steelcase stays ahead of workplace trends for creating spaces to help people to work, learn and heal. Steelcase was established in 1912. Their first work was a metal wastebasket. Steelcase replaced wicker with steel. It was a very great innovation in that time. This was very good for crowded cities where the fires spread quickly at that time.
Slowly the company established itself as a top office furniture manufacturer. Now Steelcase is not only furniture manufacturer. Steelcase has two unique features. One is knowledge about commercial interior industry, and another one is special visual collaboration department.
Before manufacturing this special visual collaboration, department helps to communicate with bespoke products. Steelcase leads the commercial interiors transformation. Michael Kanoza saw this industry to grow up and transform between the digital transformation and changing regulatory requirements.
Steelcase does not only manufacture one size fits all workplace furniture but also, they adopted the custom requirements and consultation needs. According to Michael Kanoza in the office furniture business they always have to manufacture special kind of furniture. Visual format for space planning software is the main feature to produce various unique ideas and to communicate them quickly.
The trends
In recent years remote working is popular to the people. Some people want to do their job from the second place, office but some people also want to work from the first place called home or third place, coffee shop. According to the sociologist work from home is considered as a first place, the office is considered as a second place and coffee shop is considered as a third place.
Third workplace is now considered as a modern workplace. Now the popular organizations redefine the meaning of workplace. Now this popular organization want to increase and consider the comfort, efficiency, innovation of employees, remote employees for increasing business demand and longer working hour.
Attraction of third place
According to the manager of advanced applications at Steelcase third place offer people to work without the colleagues and long furnitures, give good quality of food. People get help to get innovative ideas and conversation throughout the western civilization from the third place.
Many employees understand the importance of third place and they create spaces within the workplace. In result it helps to increase creativity and innovation. According to Michael Kanoza Google’s new coffee shop which is opened in California campus is the perfect example of third place.
Graziano said that they brought the combination of comfort of home and the special community of third place to the workplace for making the office as a best place to work. According to him it will change the characteristics and social experience of the boring workplace. It will bring changes a lot in work culture.
Special combination of designs and customer values
Michael Kanoza said that they saw a huge need of co creation between the customer, dealer designer and the department which was responsible to make special furnitures for Steelcase. Graziano also told that they thought about the impact of their work like design, manufacturing, delivery, product lifecycle on people, environment. They also wanted to get various unknown opportunities for making things better.
Workplace transformation
Customers want creative and money saving furnitures to fulfill the needs of special office furniture. Steelcase spent hours to understand the particular office work behavior and fulfill the demands of customers. After that the special team decided whether to manufacture the design or not. Michael Kanoza also said that team of Steelcase research the viability, the cost for special product and communicate that by using the visual communication process.
Technology for innovation
Steelcase was the first manufacturer is now the largest producers of 3D models on this platform. Team Steelcase save the CAD models to SketchUp and upload those to 3D warehouse for users so that they can download. They host SketchUp symbols on their official website in a new way.
A symbol represents a product which is used in a 3D based model. After accessing from the planning software of Steelcase a particular symbol has information like colors, finishes, materials and report of costing. All the information is packaged up into the planning software. It helps dealers and designers to organize them into floor plans. It will be very difficult to plan office configuration with the particular Steelcase products without the symbols.
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