Kayt Village from Schiavello is a new intelligent office furniture collection designed to enable balanced, active and adaptable workplace environments.
Traditional, fixed workplaces have given way to highly flexible, malleable workspaces, putting new demands on product inputs. With the modern workspace having moved away from the stationary desk to alternative and more adaptive work settings, it has become important for furniture inputs to be moveable and multi-purpose in order to respond to a constantly changing business landscape.
Based on the successful Kayt Quiet design introduced in 2008, Schiavello’s new Kayt Village is aligned with evolving technologies and the trend towards agile workplaces.
Raffaele Tigani, General Manager at Schiavello International explains that each piece in the Kayt Village collection is designed to perform more than a single function; every piece is multi-purpose and created to enhance physical and psychological comfort at the workplace.
The Kayt Village collection comprises of Cabana, Nook and Hutch, each supporting different working styles. While Kayt Cabana creates areas for communication, Kayt Nook provides places to withdraw into for concentrated work, and Kayt Hutch can be flexibly configured for both meetings and individual work settings. In this modern workspace, employees have more mobility and freedom to seek out the optimal environment for the task at hand.
Featuring multimedia facilities, Kayt Village also facilitates connectivity through physical or virtual meetings and recharging access for mobile and working devices.
The ability for people to collaborate will be a major factor in the design of future workplaces. Recent studies conducted by Schiavello reveal that traditional meeting rooms are unoccupied more than 50% of the time with employee feedback indicating that these spaces do not inspire collaboration.
According to Mr Tigani, office space is expensive for any organisation; therefore, it makes sense to move away from the concept of traditional meeting rooms that remain underutilised to a more space-efficient and cost-effective solution such as the Kayt Village collection that shapes interactive spaces for up to six persons without interfering with a building’s core structure.
The multi-purpose Kayt Cabana can flexibly serve as a meeting space, video conference room, telephone booth, reading corner or quiet spot for a coffee break. Kayt Nook and Kayt Hutch are space-efficient solutions that can ‘activate’ small spaces or otherwise unutilised transitional spaces. Employees become more effective and efficient when they have the freedom to choose and work in their own space. They can also transition more effectively between work modes as their workspace needs shift and change throughout the day.
Keti Malkoski, Schiavello’s Principal of People and Culture, and co-author of The Power of Workspace for People & Business, observes that the types of collaborative and individual spaces required in an organisation will depend on the task, personal and cultural preferences of their people. Collaborative spaces in meeting rooms can fail when they do not provide flexible tools and technology, or when they are difficult to book and have poor proximity and accessibility.
Kayt Village is part of Schiavello’s Knowledge Collection of furniture that demonstrates the company’s understanding of diverse worker needs.
