Arctic shedworking

The Arctic Drifter from Studio Les Betes is a mobile, inflatable shedworking (and indeed living) device for use in the Arctic, travelling along the ground when fully inflated (it's what one might call an Arctic roll...), then sitting in a stable formation when mostly deflated. Here's how it works inside:

The crew capsule is mounted inside a three-axis gymbal, and the heavy mechanical systems and batteries are mounted below the center of gravity, causing it to float upright in any orientation. The gymbal system is equipped with two low-speed high-torque electric motors, intended for repositioning the on-site or for short-distance travel. During wind-powered travel, the motors are used for steering control, allowing the Drifter to “tack” away from the wind.

It also has a self-contained composting toilet.Via The Design Blog
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Shedworking: a one-way ticket to personal nirvana?

An interesting article in The Independent by Jonathan Brown takes a slightly lighthearted look at the pros and cons of shedworking (though it does address some serious homeworking issues). Here's an excerpt:

Perhaps unsurprisingly in this era of the ever more pressurised workplace, the prospect of plying one's trade from the comfort of one's own abode has become one of the great desires of the modern worker. Like eating five portions of fresh fruit a day or cutting back on alcohol units, many of us are convinced it will make us happy and healthy.

I too shared that dream. But the reality of the past 18 months working alone from the sanctuary of my garden office, a space carved lovingly and at some cost out of an unused section of our garage, has steadily disabused me of the notion that this is some quick fix to personal nirvana.

Well worth a browse.
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Thursday posts are sponsored by Vivid Green, the low energy garden building specialists. Click here for more details

The Bookseller makes Shedworking book one of its 2010 picks

Some nice early words about Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution from The Bookseller magazine which includes it as one of 13 books highlighted in their Homes, Interiors and Gardens preview for 2010. Here's what they say:

You're unlikely to find pots and compost in these sheds, but for home-workers looking for a superior quality of life and dreaming of an ideal working space, these sheds are something to drool over.

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Thursday posts are sponsored by Vivid Green, the low energy garden building specialists. Click here for more details

Office Bus: mobile shedworking

Here's a great idea: go to work on the bus. Actually, in it. Office Bus is the brainchild of four students from the Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien - Johanna Rüdisser, Johanna Oberneder, Joachim Kornauth and Manuel Fröschl - who aimed to both lower pollution levels due to commuting and eradicate the waste of work time it also involves (260,000 commuters navigate Greater Vienna each workday with an average journey time of 48 minutes). Their Office Bus design features both private-ish individual work stations as well as conferencing facilities in comfortable surroundings.Via Core 77
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Wednesday's posts are sponsored by The Garden Room Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here.

The office of the future - not an office

An interesting comment piece in The Times
(or are we not allowed to link to them any more?) by Paul Warner, Chair of the British Council for Offices Urban Affairs Committee backs the concept of the “city as office”. As he says:

In future, companies will downsize the footprint of their property and make use of city-centre facilities that are publicly available — coffee shops, restaurants, pubs, parks.

Which is good as far as it goes, but while Shedworking is all for third place working, it completely ignores the fact that increasing numbers of people are now (shed)working from home. Well worth a browse and I'd be keen to hear your thoughts.
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Wednesday's posts are sponsored by The Garden Room Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here.

Crochet your own garden office

It sounds like a lot of hard work (it IS a lot of hard work) but that's exactly what Kate Pokorny is attempting to do. To be more precise, she's crocheting a yurt and detailing her work at Yurt Alert. Here's what she says:

"I started crocheting a lot, and was making many small domes when I realized that the same form could be made much larger into a crocheted yurt. Historically, Mongolian nomads made felt for their yurts via a labor intensive process that still required an internal structure at the end of the day. My project is to take that design a step further and make a locally-sourced (local to New Hampshire), self-supporting crocheted yurt out of hand-felted cording approximately 1.5 – 2 inches thick. I’m fundraising for the materials currently, the 500 lbs of wool and all of the cleaning and processing will be the bulk of that."

You can donate to the project by clicking here.
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Wednesday's posts are sponsored by The Garden Room Company®, the UK's premier supplier of garden offices and garden rooms. Click here.

Shedworking book now available to preorder

Shedworking: The Alternative Workplace Revolution will be published by Frances Lincoln in early June 2010. However, you can already preorder it in several ways:

1. You can order it from Amazon (co.uk, com, ca, de, co.jp, etc)
2. Order it from your local independent bookshop
3. Order it direct from Frances Lincoln
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Tuesdays posts are sponsored by The Home Office Company, manufacturers of unique garden rooms since 1998. Now in 10 exciting new colours. Click here for more details.

Pontoon boat: water-based shedworking

The idea of working on water is really starting to hot up, as evidenced by the interest in MetroShip and H2Offices. Here's Jruiter's Pontoon Boat, not specifically aimed at the mobile shedworker but nevertheless providing a stylish shedlike atmosphere if you like to float and work at the same time. They describe it as part apartment, part outdoor living space, part family room and it includes a kitchen/dining area, living room, and teak basking deck.
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Tuesdays posts are sponsored by The Home Office Company, manufacturers of unique garden rooms since 1998. Now in 10 exciting new colours. Click here for more details.

Pop Up

Running out of space in the garden office? Tired of packing up at the end of the day? Worry no more, because here is Pop Up by Liddy Scheffknecht and Armin Wagner. Made with cardboard it can be opened and closed like a book so that your mobile workstation, desk, and chair simply pop up (and pop down). Here it is in action:

Pop Up from abw on Vimeo.

Via @eOffice
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Tuesdays posts are sponsored by The Home Office Company, manufacturers of unique garden rooms since 1998. Now in 10 exciting new colours. Click here for more details.

When shed titans meet...

After five years of emailing and leaving messages on each other's phones, Uncle Wilco of readersheds.co.uk/Shedblog and I finally met up last week at the Home Enterprise Day organised by Enterprise Nation. Shedworking missed out on the main awards but we were presented with a rather nice In The Shed sign by Emma Jones of EN for our services towards posting so frequently.
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Monday's posts are sponsored by garden2office, the Swedish garden office specialists.Click here for more details.