Browsing by Author "Zhou, Yaoyi"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Beyond 9 TO 5 : Redefining the Role of Office Buildings
    Mistry, Nupur Shailesh (Virginia Tech, 2024-06-03)
    This thesis delves into the transformative potential of office buildings, which have traditionally functioned as private, employee-centric spaces. It confronts the challenge of reviving inactive urban areas by advocating for the reconfiguration of certain segments of these buildings into accessible public spaces. The research proposes an in-between typology, redefining office buildings into the community fabric while preserving essential privacy and security for business operations. By employing architectural strategies that enhance welcoming atmospheres, and helps bring in the street energy into the building. It advocates for the creation of vibrant, interactive zones where individuals can gather, socialize, and celebrate cultural and day-to-day events, facilitating access to the interesting parts of the building. This approach not only promises to elevate public engagement but also aid potential economic benefits for businesses by transforming underutilized spaces into active community hubs.
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    Community bonds in new working spaces of a small town
    Tagliaro, Chiara; Zhou, Yaoyi; Hua, Ying (Routledge, 2022-08-26)
    Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has created dramatic changes in people’s ways of living and working. Flexible working arrangements have become widespread and encourage more distributed work practices in countries where they were formerly less common. In the US, the abandonment of densely populated areas for less dense areas has been increasingly common since the COVID-19 outbreak. After nearly a year of remote work because of the pandemic, 31% of Americans, also including young people, prefer to live in rural areas and 17% in towns (Gallup, 2021), looking for nature, a relaxed pace of life, and a comfortable community atmosphere. This chapter explores how new working spaces (NWSs), including coworking spaces, maker spaces, and incubators in small towns have been impacted by COVID-19 and it discusses their future after the crisis.
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    Work Activity Pattern and Collaboration Network: New Drivers for Workplace Space Planning and Design
    Tagliaro, Chiara; Zhou, Yaoyi; Hua, Ying (SAGE, 2022-09-01)
    Information about the users' work activity patterns is essential for office space planning and the design of organizations. However, it is not clear yet what factors can be used for predicting work activities, especially at the group level. In this study, we found that work activity patterns of groups are associated with the workgroup's job function and their location in the organizational collaboration networks. Two hypotheses were tested through a survey conducted on a sample of 188 managers from an Italian utility company. The participants were asked about (1) the percentage of time different groups (based on job function and demographic composition) spent doing individual, collaborative, and mobile work; and (2) how network connectivity affected individual versus group work. The results showed that workgroups with different job functions spent different percentages of time on individual, mobile, and teamwork. Communication network connectivity is not significantly correlated with the amount of time spent on individual work, but statistical evidence confirmed that it plays an essential role for the assessment of the amount of work time spent on teamwork, even more than job functions. By investigating the factors affecting collaborations between groups, we advanced the research on work activity in large companies in order to complement existing studies that mostly addressed work activity patterns at the individual level. How information about collaboration networks can be utilized for space planning and flexible work arrangement policy-making is also discussed, in light of the changes that the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered.
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    Work Activity Pattern and Collaboration Network: New Drivers for Workplace Space Planning and Design
    Tagliaro, Chiara; Zhou, Yaoyi; Hua, Ying (Wiley, 2022-07-17)
    Information about the users’ work activity patterns is essential for office space planning and the design of organizations. However, it is not clear yet what factors can be used for predicting work activities, especially at the group level. In this study, we found that work activity patterns of groups are associated with the workgroup’s job function and their location in the organizational collaboration networks. Two hypotheses were tested through a survey conducted on a sample of 188 managers from an Italian utility company. The participants were asked about (1) the percentage of time different groups (based on job function and demographic composition) spent doing individual, collaborative, and mobile work; and (2) how network connectivity affected individual versus group work. The results showed that workgroups with different job functions spent different percentages of time on individual, mobile, and teamwork. Communication network connectivity is not significantly correlated with the amount of time spent on individual work, but statistical evidence confirmed that it plays an essential role for the assessment of the amount of work time spent on teamwork, even more than job functions. By investigating the factors affecting collaborations between groups, we advanced the research on work activity in large companies in order to complement existing studies that mostly addressed work activity patterns at the individual level. How information about collaboration networks can be utilized for space planning and flexible work arrangement policy-making is also discussed, in light of the changes that the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered.