Building owners and tenants are grappling with the issue of how to pull the users out of the comforts of their couches in the home office and to make the office an attractive option again. “It’s the people and the community that will pull people back”, exclaims Salla Lardot, Leading Consultant, User Experience at Drees & Sommer Netherlands, in the new podcast episode “Autonomy and agility determine the best User Experience”. She lists down the must-haves for offices in the future that can empower the occupiers in their workspaces.  

The pandemic unfolded the issue of autonomy like never before, arming the majority of the global workforce with the weapon of choice that enabled them to decide their work location – home, office, mobile, anywhere, everywhere! And as things slip into the new normal, how can real estate be upgraded to match their evolving requirements. Salla unpacks the role of data, smart technology and their interplay with the user, who are increasingly demanding more flexibility, stressing that providing a gamut of options would lead to happy and satisfied employees. Catch her detailed conversation with Jagori Dhar and Daniela Tatarlieva to uncover the latest trends within the workspace sphere and find out what would be the dealbreaker for the office of the future.

You can connect with Salla Lardot on LinkedIn and benefit from her extensive experience in workplace consulting. 

The operation of data centres are pretty one dimensional: they consume a huge volume of power and generate an equally large amount of heat. While our appetite for digitisation is expanding by leaps and bounds, so is the pressure on our environment. Phil Ratcliffe, Managing Director at Drees & Sommer UK, unpacks the various challenges in a fireside chat with Jagori Dhar, suggesting a road map to make data centres operationally better and viable for the long term from the ecological and digital standpoints.

He calls on the different stakeholder groups of developers, investors, operators and users to come together to explore holistic solutions that are beneficial across the board. From alternative uses of the excess heat for district heating to use of Cradle to Cradle design principle, modular and renewable technologies to build energy plus data centres that not only feed their own power needs but also plug the electricity requirements of our cities.

For the last few years, tourism was one of the fastest-growing industries worldwide as travel was booming. Now the Hospitality sector needs to brace up and adapt to the evolving challenges and continually enhance to serve the increasing demands driven by technology and global consumer behaviours. How best can the industry equip itself? Drees & Sommer specialists, Gesa Rohwedder, Head of Hospitality Europe and Gisela Loidolt, Hospitality Consulting Manager Europe, provide deep insights in a candid chat with Jagori Dhar. They highlight the emerging trends, new mixed-use concepts stemming from changing modes of travel, work and living that are shaping the world of Hospitality.

Connect with Gesa Rohwedder on LinkedIn to benefit from their experience.

Climate change as we know is on the top of everyone’s agenda: from governments to businesses, big or small, development sector, universities, and researchers. Around the world, there’s a growing concern on how to reduce its impact on our lives.

In a conversation with Jagori Dhar, Dr Olaf Kranz and Marco Abdallah unpack how the built environment sector, which by the way is one of the largest contributors of CO2 emissions, can make sustainable and technological interventions to help achieve the net-zero targets. They explain the need for interdisciplinary and cross-country collaborations like the German-British Embassy Talks on Smart and Sustainable cities can help make our cities smarter, greener, and ready for the future.