Disruptive technologies are challenging every aspect of our daily lives including how we live, work, shop and play. In the workplace, employers consider the “employee value proposition” and changing demographics, along with profitability and investor returns. Suddenly, the focus on “user experience design” becomes a business imperative in the War for Talent.

Sharing new research report looking at the rise of new experience design for the workplace. The report explains why ‘Super-Experiences’ are needed and what they comprise of. Including case studies and principles around ‘Super-Experience’ and the talent agenda.

Arjun will show how Zaha Hadid Architects use data analytics, sensor technology and smart algorithms to help create transformational opportunities for user-centred workplace design. He will explore how technology is helping create design processes that allow workplaces to become self-learning - adapting and transforming throughout their lifecycle as user needs evolve.

Buildings are becoming smart products. We would do well to look at the evolution of technology embedded products and trending best practices in smart product design to help us understand how the disparate collection of smart building tech offerings could become part of an overall building user experience. In this talk, Kristi Woolsey will share product development history and best practices, expound on the ways those might be applied to building design, and share a few examples of application.

What if we could take video (and text, chat, etc) and use what we know about human signals and social physics to *augment* our online interactions, start making them better, and maybe even more informative than in-person meetings? What could we learn? How might that help us be more effective in remote teams? Beth will address these questions and examine how augmented communications platforms can help organizations better understand how individuals and teams work, and the patterns of behavior that lead to successful outcomes.

When Scotiabank’s Activity Based Working (ABW) implementation bumped up against the strategy to move to full-stack Agile development, we paused, dug deeply, and designed a new way for Agile development teams to work – respecting the key components of Agile, while enabling the sharing and informal interactions that ABW enables.

As organizations re-design their space, they all strive to have their people be more collaborative. New (GDPR compliant) data tools provide insights and understanding, not only into space utilization, but also into inter and intra group dynamics allowing space assignments to be made based on the strength of relationships between groups.

There is a growing subset of leaders who are redefining the future of work. Radical may be an insufficient description of how these leaders’ workplaces are evolving. Join this session for a transparent look into organizations operating without managers. Why do these companies believe self-management will soon define the future of work? How have they made the transition? What challenges came up along the way? Everything is on the table in this wide-ranging conversation about the journey to self-management.

Workspace is now a ubiquitous element in our global landscape with tremendous power to shape markets and behaviours. Does it have untapped potential to save the world’s forests, our vital reserves of atmospheric carbon and biodiversity? Cities4Forests co-founder Scott Francisco will share provocative connections between work life and planetary survival.