Today and tomorrow, the design world is converging upon the Baltimore Convention Center to share thoughts, best practices, cool products, and swag at NeoCon East! 

View of the trade/expo floor

This year, I had the great priviledge of presenting with my friend and colleague, the fabulous Claire Whitehill.  Our presentation was focused on workplace benchmarks and best practices, and shared a few case studies of things that were working well. We had a great audience who were happy to participate and offered some great comments and asked some of the tough questions.  Let me know if you’re interested in the presentation – we’d be happy to share!

At 1 pm, one of your favorite bloggers, Sean Quinn presented on the trade floor with friends from Metropolis Magazine and Vanderweil engineers at the Net Zero Government Buildings Panel.

Tomorrow HOK’s Teresa Bridges, Whitney Loke, and Todd Pedersen take the stage to talk about the open office – moving past surviving to thriving.

We knew all these great things were happening…but what we didn’t know (or at least I didn’t), was that one of HOK’s awesome product designs was on the showroom floor.  HOK partnered with Allsteel to bring about the “Gather” line, an 11-piece collection that focuses on collaboration – thinking outside the box of the cubicle. Now I’ve seen the literature and heard the great things about it (including Silver Award at NeoCon in Chicago this year), but this was the first time I saw it in person…and it’s awesome! 

Allsteel Gather

For more information, check out this nice article!

And, here’s another, slighly less good photograph:

Allsteel Gather (sorry for the slightly terrible photography)