Office Design Ideas at CDW 2024

Office Design Ideas at Clerkenwell Design Week London, 2024

The premier event for office design ideas in London – Clerkenwell Design Week is back in 2024. If there’s just one industry or office design event you go to…it should be this one.

• Looking back at CDW ’23 there were some notable office design ideas and trends that featured across many of the pop up venues, showrooms and conversations.

• Biophilic Design: This trend emphasizes incorporating nature into the workspace. Look for elements like living walls, natural light, and organic shapes in furniture.
• Sustainability: Recycled materials, energy-efficient fixtures, and modular furniture were a focus for many exhibitors.
• Flexibility: Adaptable furniture and layouts were key as companies look for workspaces that can accommodate changing needs. This could include movable walls, modular workstations, and height-adjustable desks.

We also picked up some more in-depth comment. There was conversations looking ahead to Augmented Reality in the office design process. A number of manufacturer showrooms hosted informal chats on when AR would make an impact. At the ’23 event the consensus was that AR is coming but needs a swell of Users, app developers, etc to move it mainstream, which takes time.

As ever, new finishes were a great topic of conversation. The improving world of laminates, vinyl film wrapping, and other finishing technologies gives designers of commercial office interiors scope to add more feature without cost being added to budgets. There was an undercurrent of ‘natural finishes’. Cork, raw timber, and flooring using weaves and pattern to emulate natural materials. It harks back to the original design concept in Arts and Crafts, truth to materials. Coming after a 2 year hiatus in everyone’s life there are echoes of the arts and crafts reaction against mechanization in the industrial revolution. Natural finishes might be the same kind of reaction by designers to a period that’s been outside our control. Very philosophical.

Mobility in office furniture is coming back into focus. This was a trend way back in the late ‘90s with Teknion Nomad, ebbed and flowed over the years with new product launches, and has come back strongly in the post covid era. We saw some amazing new furniture design ideas with integral mobility and multi-functional abilities. Definitely a strong trend that’s returned for office furniture designers.

That was a few snapshots of CDW 23.

What are the new design ideas at CDW 2024.

• Design Cross-over.

This has been underway for a while and is reaching new heights at CDW 24. Design ideas from hotels and hospitality are influencing commercial interiors. Schools are borrowing from office interior design. Leisure spaces are adding work areas for the digital nomads. It’s a blurring of boundaries that is now mainstream. Any self-respecting designer has to go out and learn from new influences outside their normal sphere of activity. Good for eclectic design schemes, good for individuality and diverse styles. Less for the herd to borrow from.

• A new room divider system. Hailing from Italy the new Doors system is a wonderful concertina top-hung range that is versatile, easy to use, and has acoustics that make it worthwhile. The system can be a space segmenter used to define pod type areas within an office layout. It can be used as a sliding door, and as a space divider to create zones in the office much the same way as sliding-folding partitions. Depending upon installation the sound reduction is in the mid 20 Dbs, lower than glass partitions but effective in an open plan setting.

• Several OEMs were displaying new video conference and presentation devices making conference rooms easier to use, more versatile in terms of tech. Logitech and Orangebox showed a hyper realistic VC setup. this office pod is designed and optimized for the best VC experience.

• Also on the Orangebox front their new office desk chair is an ultra low CO2 product with sustainability designed in from the start. 99% recyclable, 64% local parts content, Recur shows how a good looking office chair can have a super low carbon footprint as well. At 35 Kg of CO2 its roughly half the level of other comparable chairs on the market…a great achievement.

• A European acoustic felt producer, Feltouch, have brought some really eye-catching designs to the UK market. Felt acoustics have been growing in popularity since Buzzispace lit the fuse over 10 years ago. Feltouch are adding to the design diversity with some panel, ceiling and freestanding ranges that give more scope than ever before in terms of eye catching styles.

• Sometimes a simple design refresh can really make a difference. Legrand have entered the market for furniture power sockets with their Incara range. The design aesthetic is cool, minimal but somehow makes power sockets in office desks and tables better. The tried and tested ‘less is more’ approach. We think the new office furniture power socket range, pitched at a winning price point, adds quality to any installation. One piece in the range that caught our eye is the 60 diameter socket. Smaller than the conventional 80 mm diameter socket modules, Disq 60 is great for USB-C charging, or a single power socket, making convenience discreet.

• On the same topic, we saw a new retro-fit surface mounted power and tech system for desk and table top called Lanes. Its really quite a step forward. Lanes sits on top of a desk cluster or a meeting table, with USB-C sockets, power sockets, divider screens and other accessories all added or moved easily within the W channel. Easy to add, easy to personalize for Users. It also offers a USB-C screen-sharing facility so that screen content can be shared amongst users, or mirrored onto a large screen, all at the touch of a button on the W channel. Slick, effective and collaborative.

Clerkenwell Design Week is always a must-see, and there are a number of stand-out new products this year. Hard to say which will have the most impact on office design…for us it’s the concertina space divider that could have a lasting effect on office design trends in 2024 and 2025. Get in touch with Fusion Office Design if any of these new office design ideas would work in your office.