The last day of the conference. This morning we listened to a forum of the panel discussing the theme of this year’s workshop: e-Networks in an increasingly volatile world.

Wendy Spinks, chair of the International Telework Academy opening the forum.

The panel discussed various recent natural disasters and the response to these including the role of the networks, telework to this.

Shane Roberts making a point.

Andrew Gaudes, general chair and the organizer behind the workshop here in Fredericton introducing the final part of the workshop: the track chair reports. As two sessions were running simultaneously every day, the track chairs made a brief report of the various presentations made.

A big thanks to Andrew for making the workshop a success.

Svein making the announcement for the location of next year’s conference in Lillehammer in Norway.

As there are two sessions are running simultanuously I decided this morning to go to the Human resources management practices.

The first session in the morning requests for telecommuting: exploring managerial decision making. As the authors were not able to make it to Canada, Wendy Spinks made the presentation instead.

The paper is a study of 65 managers in 6 organizations in 3 countries (NL, UK and Sweden). The conclusion is that managers are either very positive as well as very negative about teleworking. Howver managers still seem to prefer conservative approaches to management such as command and control.

The second presentation by Svein Bergum of the Eastern Norway Research Institute is called “Alternative strategies to manage non-dependent workers at a distance”. Svein looked at four variables that might improve the person-job fit: leadership, competence development, changing the job contents and organizational support in the public sector.

Svein talking about the problems managers of the Norwegian public road administration are facing regarding telework.
The last presentation of the first session by Martin Wielemaker and Andrew Gaudes is on diversity, conflict and trust. Martin talked about relation trust: in order to trust you need to meet this person. Once the trust is there you can move to a computer mediated relationship. He showed us the difference between functional and emotional diversity. In a next step a framework is set-up using a quadrant in which functional diversity versus a social cultural diversity will give an easy to understand overview to decide whether one should use a computer-mediated versus face-to-face meetings.

Martin’s excellent presentation.

The last presentation was by looking at Collaborative Visual Work Environments by the National Research Council Canada’s Institute for Information Technology NRC IIT  which is enganged in pioneering research on remote visual collaboration environments.

Here is a report and some pictures from the first day. My presentation was from 11:00 and I guess was well received with many interesting questions.

The session officially kicked-off with a breakfast keynote presentation by Brian O’Connell.

Brian, a president of IEEE from 2004-2005, gave a very interesting presentation called “Locating signals and noise in the study of social implications of e-networks”.

During lunch Dr Penny Jennet spoke about the use of technology in medical and health workplaces. Among the issues related to the project Dr Jennet is working on she gave some examples such as a physical activity monitor: a device that monitors physical activity of a person wearing the device on the ankle. To show people who are sitting most of their time at desks to encourage them move around more.

In the afternoon there were three presentation regarding Teleworkplace design. The first two presentations were given by Yamashita and Saji, students at Kyoto Institute of Technology looked at the design of space for virtual teams and ways to improve the quality and diversity of communication with the office.

Diana Limburg spoke about the role of design in the introduction of telework.

The last two sessions were by Reimi Suomi discussing the setting of goals of increasing knowledge work productivity.

and Yoko Kawai who looked at the City of Loma Linda’s IT infrastructure programme.

The Japanse town Kakegawa dedicates itself as a “slow city” promoting a slow life:

” Humans live about 700,800 hours (assuming an average life expectancy of 80 years), of which we spend about 70,000 hours working (assuming we work for 40 years). The remaining 630,000 hours are spent on other activities, such as eating, studying, and leisure, including 230,000 hours sleeping. Until now, people often focused their lives on these 70,000 hours of labor, devoting their lives to their companies. However, with the “slow life” principles, we would now like to pay more attention to the 630,000 hours outside of work to achieve true happiness and peace of mind.

The practice of the “Slow Life” involves the following eight themes:

SLOW PACE: We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.
SLOW WEAR: We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).
SLOW FOOD: We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.
SLOW HOUSE: We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably, and ultimately, to conserve our environment.
SLOW INDUSTRY: We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.
SLOW EDUCATION: We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.
SLOW AGING: We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.
SLOW LIFE: Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy. “

Finally, after almost 30 hours I have arrived at Fredericton, New Brunswick for the Telework Conference. Tomorrow I will be giving my Case presentation on workplace design: “Design the last frontier”.

More on the programme here

A view from my hotel room window.

The hotel where the workshop will be held.

This year’s workshop on Telework will take place in Canada. I joined the workshop in Japan in 1999, met many interesting people and had a lot of fun as well. It seems I missed 6 workshops since, so I will travel to Canada in August to attend this year’s event. The theme will be e-Networks in an increasingly volatile world.

http://www.unb.ca/conferences/enetworks/previous.html

In Shibuya I saw this Oxygen bar. Given the air polution problems, I though that this was a neat idea. I could imagine adding some flavoured oxygen in meeting rooms to increase the fow of ideas in a brainstorming session. However, it seems that there is no scientific proof that increasing the level of oxygen acts as a Workvitamin:

“Oxygen fans tout the benefits of oxygen as reducing stress, increasing energy and alertness, lessening the effects of hangovers, headaches, and sinus problems, and generally relaxing the body. But there are no long-term, well-controlled scientific studies that support these claims for oxygen in healthy people. And people with healthy lungs don’t need additional oxygen, says Mary Purucker, M.D., Ph.D., a pulmonary specialist in CDER. “We’ve evolved for millions of years in an atmosphere of about 21 percent oxygen.”

The full story here.

600 yen for 10 minutes, plus 300 yen for the mask.

The menu

People are actually queing.

Design should in the end become invisible, it should become unconscious, forgotten. A chair that constantly reminding you of its presence is a chair that has a functional disorder. A building that makes the inhabitants curse of the architect on a dialy basis (I am living in one) is like the houses in one of Ballard‘s short stories The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista. I am living with someone I was not intended to have around me at all: the annoying presence of another architect. The difficulty here is that designers, architects are trained to be highly self-conscious and more often than not, they (uhh…ok I mean we) complain about bad clients. Or better: clients who don’t seem to understand what the design is about. Jorge Louis Borges once said: “it is more difficult to find good readers than it is to find good writers.” To paraphrase Borges: most architects design the buildings they intent build with a perfect occupant in mind: ie a monk.

As Philip Johnson has made it clear to us students of architecture: beauty is subjective, what is beautiful to one is pretty ugly to someone else, de gustibus est disputandum. True words from someone who called architects high class whores. According to the ancient Greek, the world is divided into chaos or “that which has not taken form yet”, versus cosmos: “the world perceived as a beautiful well-balanced jewel”. As if god-the-architect had unrealised plans. This is what Alberti thought of this principal:

“Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse. It is a great and holy matter; all our resources of skill and ingenuity will be taxed in achieving it; and rarely is it granted, even to nature herself, to produce anything that is entirely complete and perfect in every respect.”

The Japanese architect Arata Isozaki had an original approach towards beauty in designing one of his first building’s: the Fukuoka bank building. As a young architect, he wanted to make sure that everyone perceived his building as ugly. Come to think of it, it is a rather clever approach of Isozaki using ugliness as a crutch and avoiding any misconceptions on the discussion of the building. This makes you wonder how ugly can a design become? The question obviously is as difficult as its opposite.

Here is Wikipedia’s view of Broch on Kitsch: “While art was creative, Broch held that kitsch depended solely on plundering creative art by adopting formulas that seek to imitate it, limiting itself to conventions and demanding a totalitarianism of those recognizable conventions. To him, kitsch was not the same as bad art; it formed a system of its own. He argued that kitsch involved trying to achieve “beauty” instead of “truth” and that any attempt to make something beautiful would lead to kitsch. “ The question obviously becomes who borrows what? What is original anyway? Plato said that we learn anything new, we just remember what we have forgotten. Isn’t a creative process just that: tapping into our unconscious mind, like we do at night when we dream, creating random images of which we somehow try to recreate some coherence that might work? Some of the work of many of the contemporary Dutch design such as Marcel Wanders and Moooi are trying to achieve: re-shaping the kitschy 70’s products and furniture we remember our grandmothers had (or still have) but in such a way that it fits in a temporary interior, a kind of post-post modernism. We all love kitsch now.

Sofa: Jufferbankje by Piet Hein Eek.