Eye-popping designs, hot trends, intriguing conversations and long elevators lines are staples of the NeoCon experience. The contract furniture show in Chicago never fails to wow us with the creativity and energy of the industry. This year, ChargeSpot chose to forego our typical booth space and instead, spent NeoCon exploring the trends and having amazing conversations with designers, dealers, reps and facility managers.

One thing kept coming up in our conversations, and that is – the rise of technology in the contract furniture industry.

The Rise of Technology

While the industry still heavily emphasizes and values the romance of design, technology adoption is slowly but surely on the rise. Over the past few years, we’ve slowly seen technology enter the space, and this year brought us an even stronger push to include more technology in how we work.

This year, major manufacturers and industry leaders took huge steps to integrate technology into their vision of the workplace. Steelcase and Microsoft’s partnership brought about Creative Spaces, highlighting how space and technology can interact to drive the workplace forward. Herman Miller introduced LiveOS as their foray into the smart office, tracking people and data to quantify and improve the workplace experience.

Experience, Experience, Experience

Workplace experience is the new focus, and the industry is moving beyond simple functionality to encapsulate and enhance as much of the workplace experience as possible. We’re seeing this mutiple ways.

As Perkins+Will notes:

The workplace is responding accordingly, incorporating policies, amenities, and unlikely partners into offices to enhance the workday. Curious about how this plays out? Presenters mentioned a client that hired a full-time barista to staff their reception desk as a “receptionista.”

Technology is now a key to help customize and improve on the user experience in the workplace. With access to more data, configurations and automation, technology can help customize the workplace experience for each individual and changing and enhancing how we work. Imagine – simply walking into an office adjusts the temperature, lights, desk heights, and even background music! That vision might not be very far away.

Don’t Forget about Power

Power is no longer an afterthought in the design process, but a key component of infrastructure and how space, furniture and work interact. This makes complete sense given how much power we need and consume on a daily basis, as the workforce becomes more mobile and technology dependent. As MMQB succinctly puts it:

If there’s going to be a place to add a USB charger, someone’s going to.

Of course, we can’t get away with a discussion on power without mentioning wireless charging. Wireless charging was a big buzz this NeoCon, and anywhere you turned, someone was showing a wireless charging product. With the impending Apple announcement, wireless charging is gearing up to be a new differentiator in helping improve the workplace experience.

Lightning Spark on iPhone

 

What did you see at NeoCon 2017 that excited and intrigued you?

 

Featured image from NeoCon Instagram