Interior design RBS Gogarburn, Edinburgh

In May this year our interior design team set off for Clerkenwell design week in London for inspiration and to keep up to date with the industry's latest developments. Clerkenwell is home to more creative businesses and architects per square mile than anywhere else on the planet, making it truly one of the most important design hubs in the world. To celebrate this rich and diverse community, Clerkenwell Design Week creates a showcase of leading UK and international brands and companies, presented in a series of showroom events, exhibitions and special installations that take place across the area.

Interior design Edinburgh

You don't always have to travel far for inspiration, as our designers discovered at Clerkenwell when they were introduced to some of the team behind the interior design and space planning at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Just around the corner from Amos Beech (from a national perspective), the world class headquarters for RBS are located, Scotland's largest company and the fifth biggest bank worldwide. The team were invited to come and have a look at their recently revamped spaces. Obviously, that offer was accepted enthusiastically and today we went to have a look.

Commercial interior design Edinburgh

RBS is located on a site that is named Gogarburn. The remains that were discovered in 2003 near the site suggest the site was used for agriculture in medieval times. The architects for the RBS Gogarburn development were Scottish based Michael Laird Architects and London based RHWL Architects. The concept was that of a business community with offices, restaurant, shops, leisure facilities, nursery and a training/conference centre. The main building at Gogarburn therefore has a clear social/community focus and circulation pattern.

Technology equipped meeting areas throughout the building are used to encourage collaboration with other business partners around the world as well as being an area where colleagues can “meet, focus, huddle, present or chat” depending on the project in hand.

“Scrum” areas are situated within departments where ideas, processes and improvements can be discussed robustly and advanced by using a simple step by step process allowing them to “fail faster, more of the time” – an expression that demonstrates their committal to “discover, design, develop & test” anything they create, before it is launched internally or externally.

Working environments play a key role in the attraction and retention of staff and  it was great to see how RBS implemented this at their Gogarburn site in Edinburgh!

Design and Build our Team @AmosBeech

At Amos Beech in Scotland we Design and Build commercial interiors and furnish them. We pride ourselves that our design solutions exceed customer expectations and that we finish each project on time and within budget. This is not always easy, but with our team we manage to achieve customers goals again and again. To be able to rethink, restructure and redesign office interiors we also work on the continuous development of our staff and on how we work together. So on the first of August we set off to BlueSky Experiences in Perthshire. As this is an official Scottish public holiday (harvest day) we thought that we should be guaranteed to have good weather.

Team building

In the capable hands of Iain McPhee and his colleagues James and Mike we were led to believe that our flight to Los Angeles had to make an emergency landing within dense woodland in Scotland. Our team was split up into three and we had to regroup and together, find clues hidden in the woodland to be able to contact the emergency services. Before we set of in blacked out Land Rovers, Iain gave us a crash course on communication; the characteristics of high performing teams, leadership and the different roles team members have within a team.

In our group the real leadership quickly surfaced:

As we all have great confidence in the sense of direction that our interior design manager puts into her work, we followed her in humble acceptance.  By navigating our way through fields and forest we learned about communication within our team and interaction. Unfortunately this didn't prevent us from getting lost:

When the going gets tough, the tough get going and that's where great teamwork fell into place!  Other team members with a bit more sense of direction stepped in, formulated a plan and got us back on track:

This plan allowed the team to navigate out of the dense woodland to a site of sanctuary where three daring team members climbed the tallest tree to look out and find clues. Others created shelters and fires with natural materials, testing their bush skills.

Because carnage or not, we Brits need our cup of tea, whatever the circumstances!

The real adventurous types got on with the job of climbing the look-out post and getting the final instructions to locate the ballistic signalling device.

They felt confident that their other team members were there for them to provide safety and encouragement.

Design and Build

Eventually we had to put our brains together for some number crunching before we could get on with designing, building (design and build again?) and launching our signalling rocket. This is where the accounts department suddenly stepped in and proved their skill once again:).

Harnessing the skills of all the individuals once more for the common good. Clear communication, the formulation of a plan, the ability to react to the circumstances and the successful sharing of knowledge and expertise ultimately lead to the launch of the rocket:

Apart from the learning experience, it was above all good fun! Working together with your colleagues outside our own office interiors and venturing into the outdoors of rural Perthshire Scotland, was both useful and a treat.

Thanks to Grant for all the organisation that made this such a great team day out.

Working at a desk is just as bad as smoking?

So, once again there are some sensationalist press articles. This time telling us that working at a desk is just as bad for you as smoking!

And then we all start thinking how it must be true because we read it in a respected newspaper and the research has been done by a health organisation.

Now I am not going to rubbish research that has been carefully quantified, qualified and presented, but to blame it on sedentary work seems a little severe.

Genetics, diet and living conditions all play a massive part in our health and I would be interested too in which countries most of the 5.3m people who die annually actually come from.

Working at a desk

What we can say is that poor posture at work does contribute to more health problems than just back related.

When we go from standing to sitting in the merely average chairs that have been offered to the market since the synchro chair was first introduced in the 1970's, we have seen a massive increase in all kinds of problems and these have increased significantly as PC usage became the norm.

There are real alternatives although normally (in the UK) management teams and accountants have not seen the whole life cost and the productivity improvements in their true light. Were they prepared to spend another 20-30% on the task chair that their single biggest asset and investment sit on every day then the result would be more than seen on the bottom line results of their company.

Interestingly, as we move from the traditional 3 part office (desk space, meeting space, canteen) to the new collaborative, multi-functional and connected office allowing us to work anywhere, anytime, we are not sedentary any more.

True, there are some office workers who will never change their ways they are working at a desk and can get to work in their sleep, moving from bus to underground to pavement to desk through muscle memory but they are a reducing minority!

For the rest of us, collaboration, communication and sharing of ideas is the way forward because to survive in a global economy then change is the only thing we can be sure of and this also means changing our posture too!

Maybe, subconsciously we have returned to the hunter-gatherer work/life pattern that our ancestors enjoyed but without the sabre-toothed tiger on our back!

So good-bye sedentary, and if you are interested in bio-mechanics and how this can be integrated into 'proper office task chairs' drop us a line!