THE ATLANTIC | Depending on where you look, you could easily mistake the famed Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a robotics laboratory…or an architecture firm… or a computer-programming office…or maybe a hospital, Atlantic explains. The engineers, designers, scientists, and physicians who constitute the two dozen research groups housed there work in what may be the world’s most interesting, most hyper-interdisciplinary think tank. Researchers end up pollinating other projects with insights and ideas, within a hive of serendipitous collaboration.
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SAN FRANCISCO BUSINESS TIMES | As property owners across the city bend over backwards to court hot tech companies like Salesforce and Twitter, one landlord has been busy turning them away, SF Business Times explains. In the 150,000-square-foot San Francisco Chronicle building at 901 Mission St., developer Forest City has created such a thriving community of entrepreneurs, artists, and innovators - and companies are banging down the door. “If you are confined to your own networks and people you work with on a day-to-day basis — the same group of consumers and the same group of partners — it’s not really going to help you find out what the next big thing is,” said Alexa Arena, visionary of the 5M Project.
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FAST COMPANY | Coworking has evolved beyond spaces to socialize and collaborate into mini networks where entrepreneurs circulate through different work environments depending on the phase and needs of the projects, Fast Company explains. One of the most prominent examples of this is the 5M project in San Francisco and its three inaugural tenants: Hub SoMa (a communal workspace for social entrepreneurs), TechShop (a DIY workshop), and Intersection for the Arts (a not-for-profit arts incubator). “It’s not creating a Starbucks,” says Alexa Arena of Forest City Development, the lead firm on the project. “It’s creating a center of gravity that’s constantly going.”
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CH+D OFFICE SPACE | Jack Dorsey’s ‘Square’ - a new technology that allows anyone to accept payments using their personal smart phone - is fast growing. In two years, the company grew from its original 10 staff to a more than 100 employees. This calls for a larger office to match it’s growing workforce and the workplace desires of it’s staff. CH + D shows you the design and architecture by Studio O+A
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