Spaces + Places : Physical, Virtual and Social

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Spaces are more than just our immediate physical environment - our virtual and digital workspaces and the world encapsulated within your screen are just as important. Within an era of increased demand for teleworking, telecommuting and social business initiatives, we integrate, analyse and advise on how to best position your business for todays workforce.

In doing so, we bring together a range of techniques and career experience, including Human Factors+ Ergonomics, Information Security, Information Management, Asset Management, Management Consulting, OHSE and Workplace Culture development perspectives.

WorkSpaces
An emergent pattern in a knowledge enabled economy is the role of the workspace in fostering effective exchanges and providing supportive, attractive, enabling and flexible work environments, whilst managing the sustainability impacts of rapid change. 

Knowledge Managers, Information Strategists and Ergonomics practitioners have been able to provide some interesting insights to the debate so far, but there is still much work to do. The attraction capability of quality interior design to showcase new ways of working and collaborating is an ongoing journey, rich with learning experiences and challenges.

core workspace challenges

Within organisations, much of the information held by people is represented within their information systems, or hardcopy manuals, with the usual issues associated with storage, retrieval, update and disposal of that information. However, how are organisations able to track and monitor the information they are increasingly likely to need to know? How can they structure the modern workplace to effectively take account of this increased need for agility, and the need to sift meaning out of what at first appears to be chaos? How do they stay connected as a group when they are becoming more geographically dispersed?

When faced with organisational complexity, demanding workloads and technology churn, how can workplaces be structured to provide for the degree of agility required in todays economy? How can they achieve some measure of sustainability in doing so, when enormous change generates so much waste and redundancy? How can we avoid the patterns of generation of excessive waste by poor design?

These are some of the questions we ask at Laughing Mind, and use when working with organisations to develop more agile, connected and productive workspaces that allow them to respond to the demands of business today, whilst preparing for the business of tomorrow.

Case studies and presentations

Wiki-enabled Project Workspaces: a large part of our recent work is in assisting our clients with establishing and fine-tuning wikis as a collaborative, highly productive workspace. Using our experience in Project delivery with Atlassian products (Confluence and Jira), we have been doing a lot of work establishing Project Workspaces that draw together the strengths of PRINCE2 Project Management methods with the agility, transparency and connectedness of Enterprise 2.0 toolsets. This has resulted in fast project ramp-up, supported by effective dashboards, templates and methods proven in the heat of project delivery, with a high degree of transparency of project efforts at any point in time for project participants. We've found it's a great approach to treat Collaboration Dysfunction.
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Cacoon Hangout spaces for whimsy and a creative play trigger..