By: Julie Knight, RID The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has released the 2017 findings of the American Fitness Index (AFI) report. The AFI findings assist communities to identify opportunities to improve residents’ health and to help use community assets to better support a healthy and active lifestyle. The AFI report measures personal health, preventive health behaviors, levels… Read More

By: Catie Sterling I was very fortunate this year to have the opportunity to go to NeoCon for the first time with IDO. As a new interior design professional, I tried to take in as much of the convention as possible. Dozens of manufacturer’s reps informed us on their innovative new products, new directions of their companies, and allowed us… Read More

By: Lee Boyland Our society is speeding along at the pace of technology, and our schedules are packed with commitments. Some of us are great multi-taskers and we thrive on staying busy, checking off lists of to-dos, but we can only keep up at that pace for so long. Our brains need a break from work, extra curriculars, and we… Read More

By: Yasha Ogg This past Friday, February 10th 2017, I attended a WELL Building Standard workshop at the Lighting Agency in Denver, Colorado. With health and wellness being key words that are creeping into the building industry, it was interesting to learn about how this new rating system works. Pioneered by Delos, the WELL Building Standard is the culmination of… Read More

By: Donna Metallic As Interior designers, we can influence the well-being of occupants and drive productivity of the occupants in the workplace by introducing the WELL Building  philosophy in which the built environments minimize the impact to the human occupant. The office workplace is morphing to adapt to new styles of leadership, to reflect the culture and brand of a… Read More

By Kelsey Venekamp The sun is shining, the squirrels are playing and you’re inside—buried under folders and sticky notes, sitting at your desk, without a ray of sunshine in sight. With spring in the air and on our minds, now is the perfect time to reflect on the beauty and newness of the season and use that inspiration to de-clutter… Read More

By Lindsay Ferro & Yvonne Rush In our previous blog about the IIDA Fashion Show, you read about how we were inspired by emoticons for our “upbeat” garment. We knew emoticons (or emojis) made us happy based off our own experiences with them. We smile and laugh all of the time when one of our coworkers Lync messages us anything… Read More

By: Janet H. Thomas, RID There’s so much buzz about workplace trends in the office environment. Opinions are abundant on what the environment should be to promote the most creativity, productivity and cultural connectedness. So I asked myself, are the Industry professionals promoting these trends actually following them in their own work environments? Some on-line research revealed the following: Environment –… Read More

By Gary K. Pino, FMP, SFP My esteemed colleague, Donna Metallic, RID, has just written an awesome blog article entitled, “2016: The Workforce Tide has shifted”, which focuses on the emergence and influence of the “millennial generation”.  Seeing that my wife, Cindy, and I have raised five (5) millennials, born between 1984 and 1994, I consider myself to be a… Read More

By: Donna Metallic It is true the Millennial generation now makes up the largest population of the workforce.  At 27% of the workforce this group will bring new perspective and will drive different expectations. In fact, as Jamie Gutfreund, chief strategy officer for the Intelligence Group notes, a full 86 million millennials will be in the workplace by 2020—representing a full 40%… Read More