Tag Archives: work pod

These Japanese-inspired office pods offer an oasis in busy workplaces

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Design trends come and go. Some even say they swing back and forth like a pendulum. Office cubicles and room dividers were once deemed impersonal and anti-social, but open floor plans that replaced them are now considered too distracting and unproductive. Whichever way that design pendulum swings, the workplace will always be a busy place, and people in that space will always be in need of some safe, quiet area from time to time. Rather than building permanent walls and rooms, office pods have become a more economical alternative, offering an enclosed sanctuary even for just a few minutes or hours. This minimalist work pod promises the same but adds a touch of Japanese-inspired aesthetic to bring a visual and aural retreat right in the midst of a chaotic office.

Designer: Staffan Holm

The Zen Pod is designed to blend with its surroundings, but its beauty makes it stand out easily as well. Inspired by Japanese design, the small boxed room exudes serenity and quiet, both with its uniform lines and conventional shape as well as through its material construction. The slatted oak wall fitted into the glass barrier creates an enclosure that is private but not isolating. People can still see each other on both sides, maintaining a smidgen of human interaction even while enjoying some moments of peace and quiet.

The pod doesn’t just embrace a person inside a beautifully minimal space, it also protects them from outside noise and distraction. The materials used in the Zen Pod’s construction were chosen not just for their beauty but also for their acoustic properties. It is able to dampen sounds by as much as 31dB, freeing people inside to converse comfortably and privately, whether for work or for fun.

It’s easy to get lost inside this visual and acoustic oasis. The choice of “sympathetic” materials like wood, wool, glass, aluminum, and steel all contribute to conveying a character of warmth and elegance that you’d typically encounter in Japanese design. For those who need a few moments to retreat from the frenzy of the workplace, nothing says “detachment” better than leisurely sipping a comforting drink while watching the action unfold outside the safety of the room’s glass walls.

The Zen Pod carries a tinge of irony in its design and purpose. Intended to look relaxing and to protect its occupant from the hustle and bustle of an office floor, it is also meant to be a place of intense work or serious conversation, not really allowing the person to fully escape the duties and responsibilities of the day. Built-in power outlets, shallow angle lighting, and adequate ventilation all work together to also induce a productive working atmosphere. It strikes the perfect balance between work and calm that cubicles and full office rooms can’t provide.

Best of all, the Zen Pod is designed to be less stressful to build and install in spaces that need this small escape. Although it will hardly be economical to fill an office floor with these small booths, it’s the kind of safe space that every workplace needs to have. Plus, it looks great, too, which can help uplift the atmosphere in a busy work environment, standing out like a beacon of hope for anyone who needs to take a break once in a while.

The post These Japanese-inspired office pods offer an oasis in busy workplaces first appeared on Yanko Design.

Microsoft’s office pod creates a private working space to help you get away from the noise!

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As we gradually make our way back into the office, we can’t help but miss the best parts of working alone from home. We have our favorite chairs, our home desks, and our desktop computers. You can’t beat the social element of office working, but sometimes you just need to get away from the noise. Designed for hybrid workplaces, Flowspace from Microsoft was recently recognized by Red Dot Design and given its Best of the Best Award for its innovation as an office pod for solo working in crowded offices.

Draped in gray felt, Flowspace comes with automated privacy panels that create a hybrid of a conventional desk and round pod. As currently conceptualized, each pod comes with its own desktop computer, desk, and stool. The desktop computer’s monitor spans almost the entire panel inside the pod, making it an ideal screen for heavy workloads and even presentations. The pod itself comes in two halves to combine and provide plenty of privacy amidst busy work zones. Whenever you want to get back to the WFH grind, Flowspace creates a temporary sanctuary for focus and deep work. With the so-called ‘new normal’ making its way around the globe, we’re all eager to have a little bit of both–the charm of working alone and the excitement of collaboration.

Microsoft is known for streamlining our workdays. From computer programs to actual computers, Microsoft has always designed the necessary equipment for us to get through various tasks throughout the day. Flowspace is yet another addition to Microsoft’s long catalog of office supplies that make the work grind that much easier.

Designer: Microsoft

These eco-friendly meeting pods use solar energy to power up charging ports so you bring WFH outdoors!

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In recent months, cafes and outdoor workspaces have limited their public amenities to avoid crowding. No more WiFi, the bathrooms are always locked, and time limits for tables are used to control foot traffic. Even still, with pandemic mandates resurfacing, the first taste of bringing our laptops to our favorite cafe to get our work done is hard to kick. Offering their own solution to the unpredictable circumstances of today’s world, furniture studio Duffy London debuted the Minka Solar Pod, an outdoor companion to their indoor office pod.

The Minka Solar Pod operates primarily as an alternative to meeting places and WFH spots like WeWork and cafes with WiFi. Unlike their indoor counterpart, the Minka Solar Pod and its amenities are entirely powered by photovoltaic panels and lithium-ion batteries. Using solar energy for power allows Minka Solar Pods to be placed anywhere, from busy city plazas like Union Square or public grounds like Hyde Park. Designed to be an outdoor working space, Minka Solar Pods come complete with four USB ports for charging and acoustic panels to quiet outdoor noise while amplifying the conversations taking place inside the pod.

Each Minka Solar Pod also accommodates up to four people, which means work meetings that would typically remain indoors could be taken outdoors for some fresh air and a change of scenery. Minka Solar Pods were also built to be weather-resistant, with high-grade walnut and oak veneers finished with powder-coated mild steel. So come drizzle or shine, there’s always an excuse to bring work outdoors. Describing his own inspiration behind the Minka Solar Pod and its indoor companion, Duffy London founder, and director, Chris Duffy says,

“We wanted to design a piece of communal furniture that can meet the needs of the modern working and municipal environment. Indoor or outdoor, our Minka PODs serve as highly adaptable, non-defined spaces that act like mini-hives for human interactions.”

Designer: Duffy London

Clad with powder-coated mild steel, Minka Solar Pods are built to brace the weather.

Minka Solar Pods were initially designed to provide an outdoor workspace for small business meetings or a change of scenery for those of us still working from home.

Outside of work, Minka Solar Pods can function as social meeting hubs for friends and coworkers alike.

Developed in varying structures, Minka Solar Pods embrace the same open-air, collaborative environment.

Each Minka Solar Pod comes equipped with four USB ports and photovoltaic panels to stay powered and charge your devices.

With acoustic panels, Minka Solar Pods quiet the outside noise while amplifying the conversations taking place inside of the pod.

The pod’s high-grade walnut and oak veneers were derived from sustainably sourced forests under the supervision of the Forest Stewardship Council.

Floating office pods are the future of a truly flexible lifestyle and remote work!

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Forget waterfront offices, what about an office literally on the water? Think of Enclaves as office meets lazy river (productivity levels not included with the structure). Remote work and flexible lifestyle have seen a boom thanks to the pandemic which has led to a lot of innovative designs like this floating office pod which is a low-impact concept offering the best of views with maximum privacy for focus.

In the future, you will find Enclaves floating on the Vistula River with the Wawel Castle as the backdrop. Designer Agnieszka Białek who made this zen office pod is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland which explains the picturesque theme. Białek was inspired by her usual pandemic strolls (which were the highlight of all our lives) along the Vistula River and thought of how cool it would be to have floating co-working spaces that would have no footprint on the land. You will have to use a kayak to get to the pod which means effectively eliminating any disturbance people. The pods will be designed to be active day or night and can be rented by the hour to host meetings, change the scenery or just get into a deep focus zone!

The architectural structure has soft, curved edges and a contemporary look which is a contrast to the natural setting but still complements it. Since the pods are floating on the river, it reduces utility requirements to almost zero and there is no soil degradation. Enclaves look like bubbles on the river – the natural foam creates floating, geometric shapes that grew into a larger version for the project. Like lily pads, the pods are anchored to the river bed and also attached to each other like a network which makes it modular in nature. The pods can be 3D-printed within a few days using waterproof and recycled/recyclable materials to further reduce their environmental impact. It comes with built-in furnishings that create versatile spaces to suit everyone’s work personality and needs.

“It is still difficult to define the changes that [COVID-19] will make in architecture in the long run. We know for sure that we are facing a new reality. Remote work has become the norm for most companies and will continue for a long time to come. Consequently, employees will be able to choose the time and form of work. To a large extent, we will notice fatigue with the home space. We will gladly move the work zone from home to another place. The concept makes working remotely possible, becomes a comfortable place for online meetings, or relaxing in the new reality of reduced touch,” says Białek. Till we can get our own Enclaves, let’s continue with those daily walks.

Designer: Monolight Studio

Apple, Nasa, Buzzfeed & more use this office pod that has been soundproofed with 1000 recycled bottles!

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For most of us, it has been one whole year of working from home – congratulations! We have all adapted to the ‘unprecedented’ times in our own innovative ways as we share our homes with other people, pets, and do our best to work from home and not live from home which can be hard sometimes without a physical boundary to separate them. It left all of us wishing for our own office pod or productivity bubble where we can just zone in, something exactly like this Focus Room!

ROOM  is a company creating personal prefabricated home offices for our flexible lifestyle as more people choose to work remotely even as things open up. Each office pod is thoughtfully designed to give you privacy, encourage productivity, and create the psychological boundary between work and home so you can maintain a healthy balance. One of the coolest parts about these office rooms is that each booth’s soundproofing layers are made from 1000 recycled plastic bottles! “From design to delivery, we strive to lessen our impact on the environment. Our products are engineered with recycled materials and replace multiple cycles of construction, minimizing noise and our footprint,” says the team.

The comfortable setups ensure you have a place to zone-in and work without distractions with features that shield and block out noise disturbances. Your private office comes equipped with a desk, accessory rail, and built-in power too. You’ll also receive USB ports at your fingertips to keep your devices charged and the most impressive and efficient feature is the wireless charging integrated into the smart desk. These personal office rooms are shipped in four flat boxes and are sold directly to the user to cut out all the extra costs. ROOM’s rooms are a popular choice with Apple, NASA, Buzzfeed, Reddit, Hulu, Uber and more!

Designer: Room

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Work from home making you claustrophobic? Now you can work outside all year long!

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Have you shushed your sibling during a call or gave your partner a death stare when they walk in the middle of your Zoom conference? If I had a dollar for every time I did that, I would be able to buy multiple of these home office pods! Assemble it in your backyard in just a day, we all know we need a home improvement project as an outlet because banana bread can’t hold the fort any longer.

If you share your apartment or just generally have a small urban home, you must have made a lot of makeshift arrangements for a professional background but is it really helping you focus when you are living at work? Let’s revise to what it is – working from home, rather from your private backyard office because you are a boss for keeping it together in 2020. This pod is called ‘My Room in the Garden’ because that is exactly what it is and we don’t want to leave any space for confusion as we are all trying to minimize our per-my-last-emails. The pod’s external structure is crafted from weatherproof aluminum and the interior has been designed using birch. To alleviate that claustrophobic feeling there are floor-to-ceiling windows that let plenty of natural light flood in. As previously mentioned, you are the boss and therefore this pod is fully customizable to fit in your existing space. Since it is a modular prefabricated system, you can build your pod in a way that it optimizes your backyard or your driveaway without having to move anything around. The smallest unit is around 6 feet by 8 feet, and costs $6,400; the largest starts at $13,600 and you can expand it with as many modules as you want.

“All components are pre-assembled flat-pack design, which is digitally fabricated and geometrically efficient to minimize material waste. Features like peg walls are great at organizing the internal space allowing for flexible configurations of shelves, storage, desks. You finally have the space you always wanted, a spare room just outside your home where you can concentrate, work or relax,” says the team.

Designer: My Room in the Garden

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These tiny aluminum pods are designed keep claustrophobia away when you work!

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I can’t be the only person constantly looking to upgrade my work from home space, right? It has become a big part of our lives but we may still find it tough to make it a big (physical) part of our homes and I know many people need a dedicated zone to feel productive. Keeping this big lifestyle change in mind, Dutch Invertuals has designed a series of office pods made from corrugated aluminum and wood for a Dutch holiday park operator Droomparken.

Appropriately named Tiny Offices, these compact workspaces were created in a way that they encourage freedom, creativity, and performance. The pods measure approximately 6 square meters and the raw corrugated aluminum structure features contrasting wooden doors with a large window frame on the front. “The biggest inspiration came from projects which were completely embedded in natural surroundings,” said Dutch Invertuals architect Chris Collaris and design director Wendy Plomp. “It’s almost an ‘end of the world-place’ with that big window overlooking it,” said the team and I cant help but think how fitting it is for 2020, you know the world could be ending but you have to send that email!

All the pods have custom-designed interiors in different colors and are accentuated with different materials- felt and acrylic that were picked for their functionality. “Because it is a small and intimate space, all materials should make sense. Therefore we used an acrylic wall that makes the space look more spacious, but you can also write on it,” says Collaris. It is vital to make small pods, especially if you are going to spend most of their day there, to not feel claustrophobic – this design allows for plenty of light and creates openness through details. The project was accelerated after the pandemic because there was no question about having a normal office anymore, the shift was overnight worldwide and people started to look for solutions that would not impact their productivity and help them work under the pressure of a crisis. Tiny Offices might just be the future of new normal!

Designer: Dutch Invertuals

This A-shaped wooden studio is built using the Bahareque method and Ecuador’s local resources!

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I wish I was an architect so like David Guambo I could also build myself a cozy, wooden studio! The architecture student made Kusy Kawsay, a small hut-like housing that rests on stilts in hilly rural Ecuador with a straw roof and wood framing. Kusy Kawsay means ‘passionate life’ in Kichwa (a dialect of Quechua, a language used in the Andean region), and the tiny house reflects it wonderfully.

Guambo studies architecture at Universidad Tecnológica Indoamérica (UTI) in Ambato, Ecuador and like most students, he just wanted a space for him to do projects while listening to loud music – that is how this tiny studio was born! To build his dream focus pod, he worked under the guidance of Al Borde, a local architecture studio that successfully completed the renovation of a deteriorated 18th-century house (!) in Ecuador. The main purpose was to be able to play loud music without disturbing the neighbors so Guambo used a traditional construction method known as ‘Bahareque’, a building system that involves weaving sticks and mud to construct compact walls, to make it sound-proof. Even though the exterior reflects the traditional design technique, the full glass window gives it a modern touch.

The hut has a gabled roof that has been layered with grassy straw. The walls pack dried mud tightly between wood framing to make it sturdy. One of the most beautiful features is the whimsical triangular window in the front of the studio that allows plenty of sunlight in while giving you a view of the natural landscape. The crisscrossing wood beams turn it into a studio on stilts and there are cut-up wood logs form several rows of bench seating underneath the unit where passerby can sit in the shade for rest. The interiors are simple yet warm, the roof structure is exposed and the floors are covered with wooden planks. It is furnished with a minimal wooden desk that is aptly placed in front of the large window along with a chair, the set is crafted from leftover logs.

“I’m making a study room, with wood, with straw, and everyone made fun of me because I am constructing with a traditional system. This is because we don’t value what we have, they prefer to do foreign things, thinking that they will save money. But what I believe they don’t know is that you can reinterpret with the things we already have, to do new things, you have to change the mentality of people with this project that I’ve done,” says the resourceful, wise, young designer and we agree – good design doesn’t have to be expensive or hi-tech!

Designer: David Guambo

This Sunken Studio is the ultimate zen work from home pod!

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Looking for a modern-day underground bunker to work from so you can actually focus during these ‘unprecedented times’? Me too and that is why I found this Sunken Studio for us. It makes me feel like we will be living and working inside one of those snow globe zen gardens!

We were all slowly pivoting towards a more flexible lifestyle and then the pandemic sped that up leaving us to adapt to remote working overnight. It went from being a perk at new-age companies to a mandatory practice without a definite end in sight. And while we never imagined this is how the transition would happen, it has opened up all kinds of creative solutions for home offices. Igor Leal’s Sunken Studio is another unique design to add to that list, it was made to keep you away from the everyday disturbances by giving you a sleek subterranean workspace. Also, you can get creative with your ‘roof’ – will you like to have a picnic lunch or play golf? The 500 square foot studio concept was a custom solution requested by a client in Rio De Janeiro who wanted a fully functioning workspace that he could spend long hours in. That is why it features a sitting area, kitchenette, bathroom, and desk area. This is a modern, compact office that allows you to host small conferences, do video calls, and meet clients without any interference. Also, once you are in the zone you don’t have to come up above ground for small things like a snack or bathroom break.

A glass facade overlooks a small courtyard with a bench to open up the structure, make it airy, roomier, and allow for natural light to enter the space. It is also an ideal spot to escape the mid-day slump, I personally love to have my coffee away from my desk and get some fresh air. The office is subtly submerged into the ground and covered with a grass roof to conceal the volume from view without taking away from the natural landscape. The Sunken Studio is an ultimate focus pod!

Designer: Igor Leal

This work from home office is the best investment for 2020!

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Home offices are trending like we are in the 90s and its neon fashion – everyone is doing it (not like we had a choice) and it has been a long overdue Pinterest project for so many! Designers all over the world have been inspired to created innovative and productivity-enhancing work from home product designs that range from furniture to modular pods. The latest one to catch our eye was the Zen Work Pod because in 2020 you don’t need a shed in your backyard, you rather have a warm minimalist office instead!

The company behind this work shed has been acing the game when it comes to well-designed office furniture like flexible desks and ergonomic chairs. The Zen Work Pod was a culmination of their furniture design mission clubbed with the need of the hour. The minimalist backyard structure is a stark contrast to the existing toolsheds, it is a modern workspace equipped with all essentials needed for a ‘zen’ workday. “It provides a fresh solution that completely redefines the home office, providing maximum focus during every working hour,” says the team who especially kept creators and freelancers in mind while designing it. The pod features floor-to-ceiling windows and an angular roof all wrapped in a sturdy oak, walnut, and aluminum structure. It is compact but the minimal build and sweeping windows make it feel spacious.

The pod comes with organized shelves, drawers plus the company’s Smartdesk 2 and Kinn chair. While it doesn’t have an air conditioning unit, there are electrical provisions and space to install one if you need it. The warm woody interiors give it a comfortable vibe if you have to spend your whole day working in a shed. If you have a backyard, this office space is worth investing in as we move towards a more flexible lifestyle where work from home will be a normal option even if you aren’t a freelancer or creator. It provides a dedicated space for you to focus and can double up as a Netflix den if you want to binge-watch a thriller without distractions! Its called work-play balance.

Designer: Autonomous

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