News Archive
2012
Exploring clues, cues and direction in space.
On Wednesday 27th of June, AMA hosted the 9th Building and Social Science network (BASS) event. Rakhi Rajani, Principal at Human Editions, led a discussion on the cognitive narrative in space and the considerations to be made through design and innovation. For information on BASS and previous events, click here.
Celebrating a 'new' refurbished primary school.
On 11th May, Robert Browning Primary School in Southwark formally opened their newly refurbished and extended school with a summer 'street party' to also celebrate the Queen's Jubilee and the bi-centenary of Robert Browning's birth. The whole school community gathered together to create a spectacular event. Over the last few years, AMA worked closely with the school to design a prominent new entrance that not only welcomes visitors, but also improves security and the school's identity in its community. In addition a new nursery building with a covered play space and separate garden have also been added - all set in a newly landscaped playground. And finally, administration offices, ground floor classrooms, and toilet facilities were reconfigured to provide a new cluster of teaching spaces - making better use of the tight urban site and creating new, exciting places within the existing Victorian buildings.
Design for knowledge transfer.
Alexi Marmot presented 'Maximising Workplace Interaction: design for knowledge transfer' on Thursday 26th April 2012. This presentation was organised by The Facilities Management Association and hosted by Condeco, Herman Miller and AMA. You can watch a video of it here.
A forward thinking approach to a 'Children Looked After' facility.
AMA's extensive refurbishment of 7 Talfourd Place for Southwark Council's 'Children Looked After' programme has just finished on site and has been handed over to the client. The project saw a complete reworking of the existing building to meet a complex brief and provide an uplifting and forward-thinking new facility.
Gates Foundation Headquarters featured in The New York Times.
The New York Times featured an article entitled 'In New Office Designs, Room to Roam and to Think' on 17/18 March 2012 about the new headquarters for The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. AMA served as the workplace consultants for this exciting project. Martha Choe from the Gates Foundation is really pleased about AMA's contribution to the campus, noting 'the incredible way the workspace serves our work.' Referring to this article, AMA director Alexi Marmot commented that 'the takeaway message is the power of workplace to express changing ways of work and organisation - while saving on overheads, promoting employee satisfaction and productivity.' Learn more about the project here.
Understanding behaviour is central to managing sustainable buildings.
Director Joanna Eley spoke at the 2012 Ecobuild conference in London on Occupant's behaviour and their ability to make the most of buildings' sustainable design capabilities on a panel which focused on ‘Buildings in use.’ Speaking to an audience of architects, engineers, surveyors and others with interest in sustainability and the built environment, this presentation focused on ensuring that users behaviour is understood and included in the management of sustainable places. Joanna commented that awareness raising - bottom-up - approaches are very important, but that as people are very varied in their perception some situations call for top-down action.
2011
Director Alexi Marmot joined 21 other thought leaders to edit the IFMA Foundation's new publication, Work on the Move: Driving Strategy and Change in Workplaces, unveiled at the World Workplace 2011 Conference & Expo, in late October. Visit IFMA's bookstore to purchase a copy to learn more about the evolution of the workplace.
Director Alexi Marmot shares insight on the future of work in the September issue of Think Act. Read more about how mobile working is transforming the way organisations of all sizes operate here.
AMA showcases recent library projects in the newest edition of AMA Nexus.
AMA was mentioned in Architect News' 30th June article about the recent British embassy event in Greece, which celebrated completion of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center architectural designs. Learn more about the project here.
AMA director Alexi Marmot recently presented at the British Council for School Environments's 28th June event, The Design and Management of Learning Environments – Future Funding: Future Planning, in London.
Alexi Marmot joined panellists to present ‘The future of the education estate’ at Education Investor’s Summit 2011 in London 5th April 2011. For more information, click here.
On 29th March 2011, Alexi Marmot and AMA colleagues hosted an event with university estates directors to discuss strategies to use space more effectively while providing an excellent student experience. For more information, contact us.
Joanna Eley presented preliminary findings from the Energy Efficient Whitehall project during the Knowledge Transfer Network’s 24th March 2011 event on ‘Changing User Behaviour in Buildings’.
Alexi Marmot gave a keynote talk, Are libraries special?, at the SCONUL conference on 2 December. For more information, click here.
Alexi Marmot spoke on Radio 4's Today Programme on the benefits of maintaining a pleasant work environment in face of the government's drive for cost efficiency.
AMA won Energy Efficient Whitehall commission -- the Technology Strategy Board and the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) have commissioned AMA to pilot WorkWareSUSTAIN, our innovative toolkit designed to reduce work-related energy and carbon emissions by gathering data and delivering tailored behavioural change programmes. AMA is one of just nine companies involved in the £2m programme. For more information, click here.
AMA has begun working on an exciting new pilot designed to support behaviour change around sustainability of universities and colleges. AMA will be working with EAUC, the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges, and the project will involve a 6-month pilot in Reid Kerr College and the University of the West of Scotland.
2010
AMA completed its work on The John Harvard Library, Southwark. The Culture minister Margaret Hodge has described the newly opened facilities as a "stunning exemplar of the sort of practice we would like to see mirrored right across the country of a very welcoming environment, fantastic layout, good facilities for children and great facilities for people to learn" 1st December, 2009, London, Community website SE1. David Jenkin presented this work at IFLA on Saturday 14th August in Gothenberg, Sweden.
AMA's Guide to Successful Interaction has been designed to highlight the key importance of interaction spaces in workplace design, and draws on the research findings to emerge from WorkWare CONNECT, a tool launched by AMA in 2009.
You can now determine how well your building is performing by using AMA's new Building Assessment and Rapid Diagnostic (BARD). This tool allows you to quickly benchmark your responses against our database by answering 13 simple questions. We will also identify actions for improvement where your building is underperforming.
A summary of our research on 'Future Health' carried out for CABE was launched on the 17th November. The summary and the full report are available on the CABE website.
AMA has recently published AMA-ZED: School design from A-Z. This tool has been designed to help generate ideas about school aspirations and the way in which school buildings and grounds can help to deliver an educational vision. Pupils, teachers, governors, parents, local education officers, PFI teams and designers can all use the A-Z in defining their aspirations for their school and its community. The booklet can be used as a workshop tool to engage stakeholders in defining what is needed for educational facilities in the whole community, in just one school, or even in a single room. The booklet also works as a creative teaching tool to elicit pupils’ desires and creative solutions for their ideal learning environments.
2009
The Buildings and Social Science network met on 12th November in London and heard Chris Spencer (Sheffield University) speak about recent trends in environmental psychology, and Andrew Gemmel discuss BRE methods, tools and approaches to social research. You can visitBASS net to join this group.
Nigel Oseland presented on 'Inspiring Innovation through Interaction' at Workplace Trends on 15th October 2009 at Kings Place, London. He also spoke on 'Implementing Flexible Working in a Downturn: A Practical Guide', at Corenet on 21st September 2009, in Brussels.
Nigel and Alexi both spoke on 'Creating Environments for Successful Interaction', at IFMA World Workplace on 8th October 2009, in Orlando, Florida.
Recent talks by Alexi Marmot have included: New learning spaces: knowing what works at the Society for College and University Planning conference in Portland, Oregon, Evidence based facilties management: future research agenda at Euro FM in Amsterdam in June 2009,Changing Spaces at the Art Libraries Society annual conference in July 2009, Purse and planet: Savings by innovative FM, space allocation and building operations at the FM Event in Wales in April 2009 and Space development and learning at Cardiff School of Art and Design and Innovative educational space - horizon scanning at Kings College, London in March 2009.
Our last Buildings and Social Science (BASS) meeting took place on 19th May 2009. BASS is a network of social scientists working within consulting and architectural practices, involved in designing workplaces. BASS promotes the role of the social scientist in creating better workplaces and provides a forum to share our knowledge, theories, methods and case studies.
In March 2009 AMA presented WorkWareCONNECT to a group of public sector clients, including representatives of local and central government and other agencies.
2008
Nigel Oseland published the article Mind Games in On Office, the workplace design magazine. In it he explores the impacts of psychological needs on workplace design by looking at core theories of psychology.
AMA successfully completed its workplace study for the new Campus for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. The new office campus is being built in the heart of the city at 500 Fifth Avenue North. It will be the foundation’s long-term home and is being designed to reflect their work in global health and learning. The goal has been to create an effective workspace that embodies the foundation’s mission and aspirations and also is compatible with its urban setting.
AMA hosted the second WorkWare CONNECT event in London in November 2008.
The value of post occupancy evaluation in creating successful bulidings is discussed by Nigel Oseland in CoreNet Global's Workplace Community Newsletter in October 2008. He gives an overview of how AMA's WorkWare toolkit can be used for post occupancy evaluation and shares some of AMA's satisfaction and utilisation findings.
AMA designers worked with the British Council for School Environments (BCSE) together with contractors and educational suppliers on the transformation of a primary school in Ealing as part of National School Environment week. The 'makeover' saw three key areas of Southfield Primary School transformed in a five day project to show how educational spaces can be changed to provide improved learning and teaching opportunities for pupils and staff. The 'makeover' was featured on BBC Breakfast.
Joanna Eley completed post occupancy evaluations of one hundred recently completed SureStart nurseries on behalf of CABE and the Department for Children, Schools and Families.
Joanna Eley has also written guidance on achieving design quality in fire and rescue service buildings for the Department for Communities and Local Government.
Nigel Oseland made a presentation on ‘How to create office buildings that really work’ at the SCRI (Salford Centre for Research Innovation) forum on 26 June 2008. The forum discussed the need to understand the activities which go on inside and around our buildings.
Building on the success of last year's learning conference, AMA sponsored the second conference, held at the Royal College of Surgeons on 18 June 2008. This year's theme was Designing and Managing Sustainable Learning Environments. The conference provided estate managers and designers with an overview of the key requirements for sustainable educational facilities. The unique element of the event is the combination of all stages of the education process (schools, academies, FE, HE) into one day.
Nigel Oseland chaired the successful 2008 Workplace Trends conference in London.
Alexi Marmot authored an article for Essential FM Report on FM and business performance, illustrating the value to businesses of well managed facilities, and highlighting the consequences of failing to ensure that buildings, and all their associated operations, run smoothly.
Nigel Oseland, primary author of the new British Council for Offices Guide to Post-Occupancy Evaluation, hosted a workshop on the guide and the benefits of POE at the BCO Annual Conference in Brussels on 4-6 June 2008. The guide, published in November 2007, can be purchased at the BCO website.
AMA’s new French office, managed by Pamela Kovachich and located in Nice, opened in March 2008. This step across the channel is an opportunity to roll out AMA's philosophy and methods through mainland Europe.
AMA's education experience in linking space to learning has led to recent invitations to Alexi Marmot to advise a major international school in Copenhagen, and the NIACE National Institute of Adult Continuing Education inquiry into the future of lifelong learning.
Alexi Marmot gave a paper on post occupancy service issues at the Architects' Journal Low Carbon Offices conference in March 2008. She showed that only by designers actively addressing operational issues and user behaviour can low carbon buildings be delivered successfully.
Nigel Oseland attended MIPIM at Cannes in March along with 35,000 delegates. Nigel was invited to a joint BCO and Architects Journal lunch where sustainability was discussed by a panel of property experts; their views were published in the Architects' Journal (24 March 2008).