media:scape
New furniture and media solution designed to help people connect and collaborate.
Strasbourg, 3rd February, 2010 - Steelcase, the global office environments manufacturer, today announced the preview of media:scape, one of its newest series of furniture solutions for collaborative work.
Today’s knowledge workers are tackling more complex tasks, across the office and around the world, so collaboration has never been more critical. media:scape is a new furniture and media solution designed to help people connect and collaborate, quickly and seamlessly. It connects people to other people, to information, to their tools and to the culture of their organization.
media:scape is a shared space that merges furniture and media specifically to help teams access and share information. While most collaborative spaces today support leader-led presentations where information is controlled and shared by one person at a time, media:scape allows for egalitarian meetings with quick and seamless information sharing between participants.
Ideal for teams who are technologically reliant, media:scape users connect laptops to a retractable, puck-shaped button. This “puck” allows users to instantaneously show and share information from their laptop computers while creating a more inclusive work environment for teams. By arranging people and information in close proximity, interactions flow more effectively, increasing comfort, focus, and productivity.
“The flow of meetings today, with participants turning their backs to each other to view presented information, tends to interrupt face-to-face interaction,” said Gaëlle Le Cann, EMEA Marketing Director at Steelcase. “People need to collaborate more effectively and they want the experience to be simple, fast, and seamless to help increase the flow of their ideas. media:scape supports these needs and provides solutions to the issues that many of today’s collaborative solutions are not able to address.”
As many businesses work to reduce costs, travel is often being replaced with high tech tools like HD videoconferencing. media:scape settings answers this and offers hosting high definition videoconferencing systems, enabling distributed teams to view content and each other simultaneously. media:scape coupled with HD videoconferencing helps teams boost collaboration – locally and globally – by helping teams connect and share information quickly and easily. “Steelcase created a solution delivering an HD videoconference experience while simultaneously delivering an improved collaboration experience and a space that supports user needs.” declared Gaëlle Le Cann, EMEA Marketing Director at Steelcase. “The result is a versatile, furniture solution that can support collaboration and allow workers to connect “face-to-face” both locally and remotely via a network connection. This is an example of how a space can work harder by working smarter.”
media:scape is available in Europe since November 2009.