There’s a new workplace design-related conference – and you’ll find it’s worth the time and money required to attend its future sessions.
The first Transdisciplinary Workplace Research (TWR)conference was held September 19-21 in Tampere, Finland. Designers and researchers (and sometimes a single person is both!) with a wide range of backgrounds, from around the world, participated in this inaugural event – which lead to interesting, and sometimes powerfully useful, conversations.
The conference organizers described the event they coordinated well on their website (http://www.tut.fi/en/twr2018/welcome-to-twr-2018-tampere/index.htm): “This conference aims to bring together work environment researchers from all relevant disciplines, both from academia and practice. This includes, but is not limited to, physical work environment (e.g. facilities management, real estate, architecture and design, building physics (HVCSE), bio-technology), social work environment (e.g. HRM, behavioural sciences, organisational science, business, health, environmental psychology), digital work environment (e.g. ICT, virtual reality), and work environment management (management, economics, FM, CREM). Presented research can focus on an individual, organisational or urban scale. The conference will provide delegates insight in both current topics and future interests. During two days, we will be discussing and analysing research on the work environment from many different perspectives, with researchers from around the world in parallel sessions…Besides parallel sessions, the conference will also provide the opportunity to discuss further enhancement of the field in special sessions/workshops aimed at jointly identifying future roadmaps for related sub-themes; this in order to provide the opportunity to form and join transdisciplinary, international research initiatives…Social, physical, technological and managerial aspects of the workplace interact with worker behaviour and with each other. Hence, a transdisciplinary approach is required to advance our knowledge and practices. Until now, different aspects of the workplace are mostly studied within separate academic and professional fields. That’s why we initiated this new Transdisciplinary Workplace Conference.”
Tours of innovative Finnish workplaces were scheduled both before and after several days of more sedentary sessions.
One of the most positive, important and valuable aspects of this conference was the professionally diverse set of practitioners and researchers involved. As a person who was a finance major but now has an environmental psychology consulting practice, I was particularly thrilled to see all of the financially oriented workplace design-focused material presented at the Finnish conference.
In the end, to be replicated and respected in the world-at-large, design needs to support desirable financial outcomes, and the practitioners and researchers meeting in Finland often – more often than at other conferences – discussed the links between finance and design.
The next TWR conference will be held in Weimar, Germany, in 2020. See you there!
Sally Augustin, PhD, is the editor of Research Design Connections(www.researchdesignconnections.com).Research Design Connectionsreports on research conducted by social and physical scientists that designers can apply in practice. Insights derived from recent studies are integrated with classic, still relevant findings in concise, powerful articles. Topics covered range from the cognitive, emotional, and physiological implications of sensory and other physical experiences to the alignment of culture, personality, and design, among others. Information, in everyday language, is shared in a monthly subscription newsletter, an archive of thousands of published articles, and a free daily blog. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture(Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design(Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.