HomeWORK magazine #5 Spring/Summer 2018

spring/summer 2018

Welcome to the Machine Can AI live up to the hype?

CONNECT WITH US Follow us online for the latest news, events and behind the scenes shots from the Workspace team.

Follow

Blog

Pin

Search: Workspace Group / Club Workspace If your company has great news to share, let us know – we’d love to shout about it!

Drop us a line at social@workspace.co.uk

Share

contributions by

+

The science of business Every business dreams of capturing the hearts and minds of its customers, but what is it that makes certain brands able to command millions of lifelong paying customers? From Coca-Cola to Ikea, some companies seem to have that “special sauce”. In our fifth issue of homeWORK magazine, we draw inspiration from science to find out how this discipline can help you better understand your customers, your employees – and yourself.

Smart businesses are delving deep into the world of neuroscience and psychometrics to figure out what makes customers and employees tick; cognitive scientist turned writer Stav Dimitropoulos explores this fascinating topic in our lead feature on page 34. Dr Luke Montuori from Central Test in Kennington Park, explains how advanced psychometric testing works, and shares his top tips on brain training. You can find out more about what makes the doctor tick in My Workspace on page 66, and more about brain training in our new wellbeing column on page 58.

Science is also shaking up how businesses can market to customers. Workspace customer Lumen Research on page 30 is helping to bring scientific testing like eye-tracking out of the lab and onto our mobile phones and laptops, at a fraction of the price. The beauty of scientific methods like eye-tracking is that it reveals the truth. As one of the greatest scientists, Isaac Newton, once said, “Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend but my greatest friend is truth.”

I believe that one of the biggest themes in business right now is our increasing ability to uncover and share the truth.

For years, opacity has been the friend of the middleman, to the detriment of those with true creative vision and, ultimately, the unaware customer. But we know that customers are savvier than ever, thanks to the internet and growing communication channels like social media.

The emergence of blockchain technology can bring greater transparency to how we do business by shining a spotlight on supply chains. Read how new advertising agency Truth is putting blockchain at its core to show advertisers exactly how their money is spent, and find out how blockchain could revolutionise the way you do business on page 12.

Alongside the rise of technologies like blockchain is artificial intelligence.

Fervent advocates believe that AI will allow us to ditch monotonous tasks and set free our true creativity; others worry that it could unleash untold horrors. We spoke to the Workspace customers at the cutting edge of AI innovation on page 20 – their views may surprise you.

This is our most ambitious issue yet of homeWORK magazine; we hope that the content inspires you and gives you food for thought.

contribute We would love to hear what you think of the magazine and of any exciting news to feature in the next issue, so why not tweet us @WorkspaceGroup using the #homeworkmag hashtag?

farah Farah Khalique, Editor @FarahKhalique

Arthur House Arthur is a freelance journalist whose writing on arts and culture appears in The Spectator, The Economist’s 1843 magazine and international art publication, Apollo.

He previously worked at The Telegraph and The Calvert Journal

Stav Dimitropoulos Stav is an international journalist who writes for titles including Science Magazine, Vice and Nieman Journalism Lab. As a fledgling cognitive scientist who veered down the journalism path, she specialises in neuroscience and has written about religiouscum-spiritual experiences for Discover, as well as a viral Medium series on the topic

Mitra Wicks Mitra is Editor in Chief of London’s online luxury lifestyle magazine, 7 Star Life, and has previously written articles for Mixmag, The Ecologist and Yoga Magazine. She regularly writes features about holistic health, food, beauty and travel. Read her work at 7starlife. co.uk and find her on Instagram @mitrawicks

Ed Owen Ed is a freelance journalist who specialises in marketing and advertising. He has written for a variety of publications including The Guardian and The Drum in London, Amsterdam and Brussels over the past 20 years. He is Head of Content at The Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing

Fleur Macdonald Fleur is a freelance journalist who has contributed to the Economist’s 1843 magazine, the BBC and TRUE Africa. Find her on Twitter @fleur_macdonald

This issue is dedicated to world-renowned English physicist Stephen Hawking, who died aged 76 on 14th March. A theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author, Hawking made groundbreaking theories on black holes and relativity. Read more about his inspiring book, A Brief History of Time, in the Workspace Book Corner on page 56.

A colour rendering of brain neurons under a microscope

#5 spring/summer 2018

contents

12

How Blockchain could shake up your Business The digital scaffolding behind Bitcoin is radically changing the business world

HomeWork, issue #5, Spring/Summer 2018, Editor/ Features Writer Farah Khalique, Art Director Dom Salmon, Writer Arthur House, Editorial Assistant Camilla Allen, original photography Dom Salmon, Neil Massey, cover image ‘Stardust’ by Nicholas Gentry, Subeditor Vanessa Harriss, Publisher/Advertising Dan Reeves, dan@true212.com.

HomeWork is published by TRUE 212; true212.com.

The magazine is printed by Alban House Print, 105 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BU. At the time of print every effort was made to ensure the information contained in the magazine was correct.

Special thanks to: Rich Walker, Managing Director at Shadow Robot Company, Zheng Lin, CEO at Intelligent Robots Ltd, Rory McElearney, Conversational Interfaces Lead at Filament, Jacob Tomlinson, Lead Engineer at the Met Office, Pippa Campbell, Nutritional Therapist, Hala El-Shafie, Founder at Nutrition Rocks, Cassandra Burns, Nutritional Therapist, Leanne Spencer, Founder at Bodyshot Performance, Justin Rogers, Creative Director at Ten Health & Fitness, Dominika Minarovic, Co-Founder at Clean Beauty Co, Mel Turkerman, Founder at DermaNutri, Amy Morris, Naturopathic Nutritionist, Dr Zaheer Hussain, Psychologist, Jack Tang, Founder at Funky Panda Games, Max Dawes, Partnership and Marketing Director at Zappar, Charlotte Spokes, Founder at My Friend Charlie, Tom Putnam, Co-founder at BeeLine, Elsie Rutterford, Co-founder at Clean Beauty Co, Jessica Cooper, Business Development Executive at Igloo Vision, Dr Luke Montuori, Psychometrician at Central Test, Adrian Hon, CEO at Six to Start, Wyndham Richardson, Managing Director at Pulselive, Cormac Bourne, General Manager UK at STATS, James Roy, Technical Director at Brainworks, Adam Hopkinson, Founder at Truth, Jonny Goldstone, Co-founder at Green Tomato Cars, Robert Styles, Business Development Manager at Norvento Enerxia, Karen Jamison, Energy and Sustainability Manager at Workspace, Anna Norman, General Manager at Camara Learning, Michalis Michael, CEO at DigitalMR, Gavin Heavyside, CTO at MyDrive, Doug Ayres, Managing Director at Filament, Ben Gancz, Director at Qumodo, Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University in St Louis, David Hall, Executive Director at Behaviour Change, Sabina Socias, UK Branch Manager at Central Test, Heather Andrew, CEO of Neuro-Insight, Joseph Devlin, Head of Experimental Psychology at University College London, Mike Follett, Managing Director at Lumen Research, Peter Halliday, Head of Communications at Igloo Vision, Phil Watton, Managing Director at Lodestar, Seán Cotter, Head of Marketing at The Chat Shop

16

Green Light for Growth Find out how Workspace and its customers are making renewable energy mainstream

20

Welcome to the Machine Workspace customers at the forefront of AI innovation explain how it works and explore its potential

+

30 The Marketing Maestros Science has revolutionised the art of selling

50 Shape up with Science Forget the fads and focus on the scientific facts to radiate health

58 The Power of Brain Training Ditch bad habits and retrain your brain’s neurotransmitters, in our new regular column on wellbeing

60 Game On Discover how our brain lights up when we play mobile games, and the cutting-edge games of tomorrow

34

The Neural Network How can our growing understanding of the human mind help us in business? Neuroscience experts walk us through this intriguing debate

the big picture

An artist’s impression of a machine-learning algorithm recreating a neural network

06

homeworkmagazine

“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted”

Alan Turing

Computing, Machinery and Intelligence (1950) Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (1912–1954) was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist

workspacegroup.co.uk

07

news

Working knowledge We all know Workspace is full of fantastic businesses – you bump into each other in the lift, buying your morning coffee or on the way to a meeting room – but imagine if you could connect with brands not just in your building but in all Workspace buildings across London.

You’re in luck! Enter WorkspacePerks, an online platform that will allow you to promote your business to the Workspace community and, crucially, give you access to giveaways, offers and discounts from other Workspace businesses. “It’s a free advertising platform that encourages our customers to trade with each other,” says Workspace’s Corporate Development Manager, Stefan Duda. “We’ve got a huge number of really exciting businesses within our portfolio and we want to give them a way to promote their brands to their neighbours.”

Launching with discounts on food- and flower-delivery services, gym memberships and huge savings on stylish office furniture (among others), look out for WorkspacePerks, coming soon to workspace.co.uk

Above: London’s first wonky-fruit-andveg delivery company, Oddbox, is on the WorkspacePerks platform Right: The Volcano Coffee Works café at Parkhall Business Centre

Combat climate change with Your Energy

As part of Workspace’s commitment to reducing its impact on the environment and do the right thing, we’re pleased to announce that our online Energy Dashboard: Your Energy is coming soon. You will be able to log in and monitor your energy consumption in order to reduce your usage and cut back on costs. The portal will allow you to view your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly energy profile, and we will only bill you for the energy you actually use.

Get your groove on with the party bus

Do you want to throw a party like no other? Gaming Party Bus has launched its state-of-theart new vehicle, offering a gaming-party experience for both novices and experienced gamers at corporate events and special occasions. Based at Q West in Brentford, Gaming Party Bus’s newest addition comes fully loaded with the latest consoles, motion race simulators and VR headsets, all adding to the unique on-the-road gaming experience.

“Bringing the fun to your next event has never been simpler,” says Managing Director Edwin Chiamonwu. “We pride ourselves on providing a truly unforgettable experience for all our clients, providing a party not to be missed!”

To find out more or book a vehicle, head to gamingpartybus.co.uk

10

homeworkmagazine

Have you had your Weetabix?

Based in Clerkenwell Workshops, market researcher Trinity McQueen has teamed up with Weetabix to develop groundbreaking new insights into how people buy breakfast cereal, helping the company clinch the Market Research Society’s industry award for Applications of Research. Trinity McQueen’s research helped simplify Weetabix’s in-store strategy and tactics by cutting back on packaging, product codes and competing promotions.

Get to grips with GDPR

New Workspace centre: Fuel Tank in Deptford

We’re very excited to be welcoming Fuel Tank to our growing portfolio of properties. Just a short walk from Greenwich, this former carburettor factory in Deptford has undergone a complete makeover and now offers ultra-modern office space, flooded with light. With 63 offices and studios, a high-spec bookable meeting room called Diesel, an on-site café serving a range of snacks and lunches, and great transport links, the space is as functional as it is stylish.

Book a viewing now, or take the virtual tour at workspace.co.uk/workspaces/fuel-tank

Spring water craze hots up The latest wacky trend taking over Silicon Valley is untreated, unfiltered raw spring water, which sells for up to $6 a gallon. One thing is for sure, the craze for spring water is alive and kicking.

Business is booming for Workspace customer, Rejuvenation Water, based at Havelock Terrace in Battersea. It sells amino acid-enriched drinks made from Staffordshire spring water, which also contain five grams of plant-based protein per bottle. It recently launched Ginger & Lime and Spanish Orange flavours in Holland & Barrett, and is also available in Costco, following a successful 10-week roadshow. It is now eyeing up Ocado.

Check out rejuvenationwater.co.uk for more flavours

Connectivity: going for gold We’re on a mission to provide you with first-rate connectivity throughout all our buildings. Twelve of our centres have now hit either gold or platinum standard for Wired Certification from WiredScore.

Launched by the Mayor of London in 2015, the connectivity-accreditation scheme rates buildings on their level of cutting-edge digital infrastructure and ability to offer world-class, secure and reliable connectivity.

The Metal Box Factory in Southwark was the first to be awarded platinum rating, the top Wired Certification, and now we’re setting sights high and going for gold (and

workspacegroup.co.uk

beyond) across all of our on-net sites.

Workspace’s Head of Client Connected Services, Chris Boultwood, said, “The building infrastructure is fundamental in us being able to provide a resilient and secure service to our customers. And we are reviewing every building in our on-net portfolio with an ambition to instill a baseline of Wired Certified Gold.

“WiredScore is now embedded into the development process of our buildings from day one,” he adds. “As soon as we hear that we’ve got a project coming out of the ground, the WiredScore process starts then.”

Sweeping new laws on data come into force from May, affecting businesses large and small. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) places tighter controls on the way businesses use data, because of routine misuse of personal information, leading to the development of “the right to be forgotten”. Importantly, the laws will stay on the rulebooks even as the UK government navigates its way out of the European Union, in order to keep open its trade in data with Europe.

Read our Q&A list to make sure you are up to speed.

When does GDPR come into effect?

25th May 2018.

Who does this apply to?

Any business that holds personal information on EU citizens.

What counts as personal data?

It’s pretty broad: any info that relates to a person, such as a name, or even something as innocuous as a mobile device ID. What questions should every business ask itself?

How was the data my business uses collected? How is it manipulated? Where is it stored? Do I need to retain it?

What are the penalties for non-compliance?

If you’re lucky, a warning. If not, fines could reach as much as €20 million or 4% of global turnover, whichever is higher.

Where can I find more information?

Try the Information Commissioners Office at ico.org.uk or the Direct Marketing Association at dma.org.uk/gdpr

09

news

Club Managers Raissa Uwineza, Shanice Buckley and Tom Henry at the newly rebranded Club Workspace Clerkenwell Workshops

Club news

Club Workspace unveils a sleek new look Seven years on from its initial launch in 2011, Club Workspace – one of the pioneers of co-working in London – recently underwent a complete renovation. “We felt it was time to give it a fresh identity,” says Marketing Manager Charlotte Bellamy. “We wanted to modernise the Club Workspace brand to reflect the fast-paced, disruptive businesses using our spaces, and we set out to achieve this with a brand new logo, revised membership options and a new website.”

With its fast-growing network of eclectic businesses across 19 locations, Club has been given a fresh look designed to reflect its professional and successful customer base. Club has brought in a range of new membership options specifically aimed at small businesses, start-ups, freelancers and larger corporates looking for additional space. This includes a new Day Pass, enabling flexible workers to drop into any Club location 9am–5pm, Monday–Friday.

In addition, Club’s new Hangout membership allows more frequent city-dwellers to use a selection of 10 of its co-working environments, five days a week. And, with each package catering to a different individual’s needs, workers can also opt for a private desk package or an unlimited co-working membership across any Club Workspace site, London-wide.

Nikki Saunders, Creative Director at branding agency Haime & Butler, took the reins on refashioning Club’s brand image. “Our brief was to create an identity to reflect the Club Workspace brand offering of creative, co-working space,” says Saunders. “The team used a cooler, refined colour palette of black and white, and mix of typefaces – one classically modern and the other a nod to the corporate font of Workspace.”

“We’ve designed an identity that better reflects the Club brand ethos, Club members and the interiors of the Clubs themselves,” she says.

“We’ve designed an identity that better reflects the Club brand ethos”

Supermodel’s charity app wins new fans

Hats off to donations app Elbi, which has been crowned App of the Day by Apple, giving it a major boost. Created

by Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova and PR professional Timon Afinsky, and based at Fleet Street’s Club Workspace, Elbi aims to bridge social media and humanitarianism. The app effectively turns “likes” into money for a good cause and offers LoveCoin rewards for donations, making helping others easy and fun. Users scroll through charity projects listed on the app and hit the “Love” button on the ones they like, similar to an Instagram or Twitter feed, which sends their donations to charities. This earns them free LoveCoins to spend in Elbi’s online fashion shop, which sells high-fashion items like Fendi earphones and fine jewellery from Messika.

The success of the app in the US meant charitable giving rocketed. All charities featured by Elbi exceeded funding goals: the Diabetes Research Institute raised 20 times (2,691 Loves) its campaign target. “With Elbi you can do small actions that make a big difference,” says Vodianova. “That is what Elbi stands for.”

Visit elbi.com to find out more, or download the app at itunes.apple.com

The insurance king: Urban Jungle

Insurance start-up, Urban Jungle, recently made a daring bid to shake up the insurance world. With young urban renters in mind, it launched a revolutionary platform that makes sorting out home insurance as easy as possible. Urban Jungle allows its partners to serve insurance quotes through their own apps.

For more information and to sign up, visit the partners page or contact partnerships@myurbanjungle.com

11

blockchain

HOW BLOCKCHAIN COULD SHAKE UP YOUR BUSINESS The Bitcoin bubble is hogging the headlines – thanks to frenzied speculation and its unstable price – but this controversial cryptocurrency has gifted the world something much bigger: blockchain. Bitcoin’s digital scaffolding has caught the eye of some of the most innovative companies and entrepreneurs with its versatile, game-changing features. Wired journalist Gian Maria Volpicelli explores its uses in business What is blockchain? Think of it as a neverending Excel spreadsheet. It is a digital ledger that can make a permanent record of an infinite number of transactions, but unlike Excel, a blockchain does not exist on a single server. Rather it is run collectively by a decentralised swarm of computers (or nodes), a design choice that makes it hard to tamper with. There is no need to back up, unlike an Excel spreadsheet saved on a single computer that may one day fail, get stolen, or be hacked.

These features make blockchain technology a smart, secure solution for carrying out and keeping track of any kind of transactions – not only cryptocurrency transactions – between a number of parties, without relying on any middleman acting as a central authority.

Over the last few years, the technology has been trialled and applied in a vast range of sectors – from banking to logistics, and even diamond trading. Blockchain recently gained mainstream visibility when Walmart announced a new partnership with IBM and Chinese retailer JD.com, the Blockchain Food Safety Alliance. The three giants teamed up in mid-2017 to use a decentralised ledger to track food items as they move from farmers to suppliers and so on, throughout the supply chain. The idea is to guarantee better food traceability and food safety.

That was not IBM’s only foray into blending blockchain tech and logistics.

In early 2018, following months of collaboration, IBM – which has developed its own blockchain – announced a joint venture with cargo giant Maersk. The objective? Building a blockchain-fuelled platform to bring more transparency to the international commerce ecosystem, and in the same breath allowing trading partners

12

to monitor the movement of freight in a secure and collaborative way.

Although logistics – and, perhaps obviously, banking – look like natural sectors where blockchain could be applied, there are several other fields currently experimenting with the disruptive technology. Diamond-mining companies are turning to London-based start-up Everledger to verify the provenance of precious stones and root out conflict diamonds. A similar process could be used to fight counterfeits in sectors

such as fashion and art, or to guarantee a fine wine’s authenticity. Music could be next: British singer Imogen Heap is working on a project aimed at harnessing blockchain tech to streamline the purchase of intellectual rights.

Last year, The Marketing Group launched a media agency with blockchain at its very core. London-based Truth promises to give advertisers full supply-chain transparency.

Its founder, Adam Hopkinson, explains that the advertising sector is particularly opaque: about 80% of companies using programmatic advertising worry about

how their money is spent, and fret over how many of their ads end up actually being seen by consumers, especially on third-party platforms. “At Truth we are planning to show and prove to advertisers that their money goes exactly where they think it’s going,” says Hopkinson. “We want to disintermediate the supply chain and make sure there are only practitioners who are doing the right thing – and blockchain allows us to create consensus across the value chain.”

First conceived 18 months ago, Truth is testing its product with multiple clients. The clients can see the blockchain technology in action via a dashboard, which records information related to their campaigns.

Hopkinson predicts that Truth – and other companies like it – is bound to radically change the way the industry works.

“Introducing blockchain will start to drive down advertising budget. Advertisers will become more aware that a lot of their money is being wasted. It shouldn’t have to be,” he says. “There’s quite a lot of disruption coming.”

Not everyone agrees on blockchain’s practicality. Analytics company Dun & Bradstreet’s Global Leader in Data Innovation, Saleem Khan, has publicly described blockchain as “a solution in search of a problem”. Among the issues dogging the novel technology du jour are worries over cybersecurity. Bitcoin’s blockchain itself is said to be unhackable, but several second-generation blockchains have been the target of malicious attacks.

Scalability and speed are also sticking points. The Bitcoin blockchain is able to manage only seven transactions per second; Ethereum (another popular platform) is slightly better at 15 transactions per second.

That is still too slow for many companies operating on a global scale. By comparison,

homeworkmagazine

An artist’s vision of blockchain

Visa’s payment network processes about 2,000 transactions every second.

Blockchain’s 10th birthday is approaching, yet this is a technology that is still undergoing growing pains. More than nine out of 10 of the 26,000 blockchain projects launched in 2016 are now defunct, according to analysis by consultancy firm Deloitte. Part of the problem is the sheer number of blockchains out there. They are not all designed to be compatible with one another. For blockchain technology to work

workspacegroup.co.uk

well in the future, blockchains cannot be limited to a single vendor or technology.

Some solutions allow communication between two blockchains at the same time, but London start-up Quant Network thinks it has the ultimate answer. It has filed a patent for Overledger, a connecting technology that it claims can match data across any number of ledgers. Quant claims that “different structures and working mechanisms make it harder to build a common interface” so instead, Overledger

addresses the issue by sitting on top of them rather than struggling to match them up.

Nevertheless, until the many issues are ironed out, blockchain technology is still yet to be adopted in business by the masses. ww Do you think blockchain technology could be useful to your sector and, if so, how? Are you already part of a blockchain? Share your thoughts by emailing homeworkeditor@workspace. co.uk or tweet @WorkspaceGroup using #homeworkmag

13

always plan ahead

Thursday 14th, Canada Water Culture Space A top panel of clued-up speakers, including Ocado and Ada Health, discuss the future of AI and its impact on all aspects of working life to come

London Tech Week 2018 - The future Impact of AI

Tuesday 12th–Thursday 14th, ExCel London Tech lovers take note: London Tech Week’s anchor event comprises eight conferences, 300 exhibitions, multiple live demonstrations and a host of networking opportunities

TechXLR8

june

Tuesday 22nd, Kennington Park This WBI Dinner will focus on the issues stemming from the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer

Workspace Business Insight Dinner

Tuesday 22nd–Wednesday 23rd, Olympia Conference Can’t get enough of VR, AR and MR? Don’t miss the best two-day conference in Europe, spanning augmented, virtual and mixed reality with 150 leading speakers, case-study led content and thought-provoking panel discussions

VR World London 2018

Thursday 17th, 15 Hatfields Get up to speed on cyber security. Find out how to instill good cyber hygiene across your organisation, what to do in the wake of a cyber attack and how to keep data safe from threat

Cyber Leadership 2018

Friday 11th, BT Centre See top speakers and sports aficionados discuss practical ways to engage new audiences

The Telegraph Business of Sport 2018

may

Monday 23rd, The Guardian, King’s Place Want to switch up the way you think about data? Delve into the world of art and design with designer Stefanie Posavec’s workshop

Guardian Masterclass: A creative approach to data: Hand-drawn data visualisation

Wednesday 18th–Thursday 19th, Olympia London Get ahead of the AI curve. This two-day conference showcases all that is new on the AI scene – covering everything from business intelligence, AI algorithms and deep learning, to virtual assistants and chatbots

Artificial Intelligence Conference & Exhibition Global 2018

Wednesday 11th, Emmanuel Centre Leonard Mlodinow talks of cutting-edge neuroscience and uncovers the secret to a flexible mind in an endlessly dynamic world

Elastic thinking: How to Think Flexibly in a Constantly Changing World, with Leonard Mlodinow

april

When your mind’s on more pressing matters, it’s easy to miss the business events that matter in London. That’s why we’ve done the searching for you. Be sure to check out our website for more unique Workspace events at workspace.co.uk/community/events From top: VR World, AI Conference & Exhibition, Women of Silicon Roundabout, Computing Conference, TechXLR8

workspace.co.uk/community/events

be sure to check our website for more unique Workspace events

Thursday 20th–Sunday 23rd, ExCel London An award-winning festival of ideas and discoveries that will leave your mind reeling. New Scientist takes over London for an unmissable five days of stimulating talks, exhibits, workshops and performances. Book your tickets now

New Scientist Live 2018: Festival of Ideas and Discovery

Thursday 20th, Jumeirah Carlton Tower In the retail industry? Find out more about the fast-evolving expectations of your consumers through in-depth interviews and panel debates addressing the hottest mega-trends in the retail world

FT Future of Retail Summit

september

Sunday 19th–Thursday 23rd, ExCel London Researchers and practitioners from data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics and big data come together

Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2018

august

Tuesday 10th–Thursday 12th, Holiday Inn Regent’s Park Two days packed with talks from industry experts on the state of the art in computer science, lectures by eminent scientists and discussion-oriented sessions with networking breaks

Computing Conference 2018

Monday 2nd–Sunday 8th, The Royal Society A free, week-long festival celebrating the cutting edge of UK science. Check out the Royal Society’s wide-ranging programme of events

Summer Science Exhibition 2018

july

Tuesday 26th–Wednesday 27th, ExCel London The UK’s vibrant centrepiece for women in tech is back. Head to east London and join the 3,000-strong movement of tech-savvy women

Women of Silicon Roundabout

Thursday 21st, 15 Hatfields UKAuthority shines a light on the advances in technology likely to revolutionise the future of healthcare, reducing pressures on hospital beds across the UK

Digital Health & Social Care 2018

“Environmental products were once considered niche, expensive and only for tree huggers�

Jonny Goldstone, MD at Green Tomato Cars

green tech

Below: Green Tomato Cars has been supplying eco-friendly transport in London since 2006

Forget launching space rockets to Mars, perhaps the most impressive of Elon Musk’s achievements has been to make renewable energy aspirational. The industry was once the preserve of eco-warriors, but entrepreneurs are now at its cutting edge – and making money. Fleur Macdonald investigates At lunchtime on a warm and sunny day in June last year, a milestone was crossed.

For the first time in Britain, renewables generated more electricity than coal and gas.

Power from wind, solar, hydro and woodpellet burning produced more than half the total energy of the UK. For a brief moment, the nation experienced what the future might look like.

workspacegroup.co.uk

The UK has committed to reduce emissions to at least a fifth of 1990 levels by 2050, under the Climate Change Act. The legal deadline should spur on governments to support green energy with investment.

This means huge business opportunities for UK companies working to reduce carbon emissions, increase renewable energy production and develop technologies and expertise in harnessing, distributing and (crucially) storing green energy. Growth in the low-carbon economy is estimated at 11% per year between 2015 and 2030, more than four times the overall projected growth of the economy.

Workspace pioneers

Businesses based at Workspace are jumping on the opportunities this presents. Never mind Uber, Green Tomato Cars has been

on a pioneering mission to transport Londoners without damaging the environment for well over a decade. Back in 2006, two City lawyers teamed up to create the city’s greenest car service, based in Q West in Brentford.

Environmental products were then considered niche, expensive and only for tree huggers, says Co-founder and MD, Jonny Goldstone. Today, Green Tomato Cars has more than 600 drivers on its books and more than 400 vehicles, such as the hybrid electric Toyota Prius. Its customers include big names such as the BBC, NHS and Sky. Goldstone says, “In 2018 we want to bring all of our fleet to low-emission, zero or hybrid vehicles.”

How? Green Tomato Cars is adding electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to its fleet, and removing diesel

17

green tech Below: It can take a company as little as five years to recoup its investment in a wind turbine installed by Norvento Enerxia

“43 million tons of electronic waste was generated in 2016” UN report

executive vehicles and replacing them with hybrid vehicles or plug-ins.

This goal is timely. The government’s blueprint for Britain’s low-carbon future, the Clean Growth Paper, announced subsidies for the purchase of low-emission taxis; Green Tomato Cars is applying for government-related grants. Transport for London is installing 150 rapid-charge points for taxis and commercial fleets by the end of this year.

Norvento Enerxia, established in Spain and now in the UK at Workspace’s The Light Box in Chiswick, develops, promotes and operates multi-renewable technologies. Its 25 turbines in the UK are used or owned by small businesses that have a reasonable energy usage, good wind resource, and, of course, space for a turbine. These range from factories and farms to a small port site on the south coast. It can take a business as little as five years to pay back the half a million or so spent on the turbine.

18

Backing batteries

Take-up of onshore wind generators has been greater than the government expected, says Robert Styles, Norvento’s Business Development Manager. “Eventually all these technologies need to become subsidyfree,” he says. “It’s just a question of how quickly the subsidies get removed before the industry is ready to stand on its own two feet.”

The main obstacle to this has been the unreliability of green energy; many sources of renewables are dependent on the weather. Plus, the electricity generated is not necessarily needed at that particular moment. The answer could lie in better batteries. In December, Tesla built the world’s largest ever lithium-ion battery next to a wind farm in southern Australia.

This is just the beginning. Musk is promising batteries for homes and commercial buildings, and Dyson is investing huge amounts in developing battery technology. Producing and using

energy locally will soon be the norm, says Styles. For that to be possible, “battery storage is going to become a very large part of all renewable installations”. Microgrids powered by renewable energy that is generated on site and stored in batteries are a long-term focus for Norvento.

Green workspaces

Green energy is a priority for Workspace.

It procures 100% renewable electric energy.

Solar photovoltaic panels have been installed at five Workspace centres, with 85 sq m of 230W panels fitted at The Record Hall in Hatton Garden alone. Six more business centres will follow suit in the near future, explains Karen Jamison, the company’s Energy and Sustainability Manager.

In addition to the solar panels at The Record Hall, nearly 300 sq m of green roof space has been added on two levels, including a wildflower turf vegetation layer.

The building’s design scored a BREEAM Excellent sustainability rating.

homeworkmagazine

Below: Camara Learning takes donated computers, reconditions them and sends them to schools in Africa. Teachers are trained in IT and the students supplied with educational programmes.

Workspace’s green warriors BBOXX designs, manufactures, distributes and finances plug-and-play solar systems. Currently based in the UK at The Light Box, and in Rwanda, Uganda and China, the team plans to bring electricity to 20 million people by 2020. bboxx.co.uk CAMCO CLEAN ENERGY works with developers, governments, banks and private investors to develop and finance clean-energy projects in Africa and internationally.

Based at Clerkenwell Workshops. camcocleanenergy.com Look out for smart sub-metering systems coming soon to Workspace; these allow customers to track their energy consumption. Jamison says, “A lot of our customers are focused on reducing their environmental impact.”

Green Tomato Cars, for example, has six offices at Workspace, which are ISO 14001 certified. This is an international standard for an environmental-management system, aimed at reducing the impact of a company’s operations on the environment. It can be used by any organisation regardless of its activity or sector. “Everyone has to do their bit,” says Goldstone.

Help the green cause

Coffee cups and the latte levy have hit the news lately but what about your computer?

43 million tons of electronic waste was generated in 2016, according to a UN report. That’s up 8% in only two years.

We’re producing e-waste at double the rate of plastic refuse. One company based at

workspacegroup.co.uk

Workspace has decided to do something about it – and you can help.

Social enterprise Camara Learning recycles computers and distributes them to schools. It performs safety checks, wipes data, installs educational programmes and ships them to Africa, where they are distributed to schools, and teachers are given IT training. Camara Learning plans to deliver 31,500 computers to schools in Ethiopia by March 2019, as well as expanding its programmes in Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia and Lesotho.

“The legal requirement is for computers to be recycled properly,” says Anna Norman, General Manager at Camara Learning. “And from an environmental perspective, it’s a no-brainer.” ww Do your bit and dispose of your e-waste safely. Camara Learning accepts all computers in good condition and welcomes large batches. Get in touch with Anna at annanorman@camara.org or call 020 8670 1225

LIMEJUMP pays you to adjust your energy consumption to balance the grid, helps you get a better price for your energy and gives you instant access to your energy data. Find the team in Kennington Park. limejump.com PARITY PROJECTS Based at Riverside Business Centre in Wandsworth, Parity Projects helps households and housing professionals improve the energy efficiency of their homes, making them warmer, more sustainable and cheaper to run. parityprojects.com EQUAL PRODUCTIONS is a global media network based in The Biscuit Factory, which produces a prime-time TV show for CNBC called Sustainable Energy. equalproductions.com

artificial intelligence

“Can AI live up to the hype?”

WELCOME TO THE MACHINE Human dreams of creating artificial intelligence (AI) are as old as civilisation itself. Countless sci-fi books and films – 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator and Ex Machina – have filled the popular imagination with colourful, often dystopian visions. Now, thanks to advances in processing power and machine-learning techniques, our fantasies are about to become reality. How will AI play out?

Arthur House asks some Workspace customers at the forefront of AI innovation to share their insights

We currently live in an age of weak AI: artificial intelligence focused on one narrow task, like Apple’s Siri. However, strong AI, or general artificial intelligence – a machine capable of performing a range of intellectual tasks at least as well as a human – is widely thought to be achievable within 10–20 years.

This astonishing progress, which is already underway, is driving what is being called the fourth Industrial Revolution: a fusion of the digital and physical worlds that will, with the help of robotics and nanotechnology, fundamentally change the way we live and work.

According to research firm Gartner’s annual Hype Cycle, an index that tracks

20

the progress of emerging technology trends, machine learning and deep learning – two of the most widespread AI techniques – reached peak hype in July last year. By Gartner’s own model, these two terms should have fallen into a “trough of disillusionment” by now, whereby interest wanes as experiments fail to deliver. And yet AI is still big news. Barely a day goes by without superintelligent computers or killer robots popping up in our newsfeeds. So what exactly is AI and how are businesses using it?

And can it ever live up to the hype?

If you’ve ever used a personal assistant like Siri or Alexa, listened to Spotify recommendations or received a fraud notification from your bank, you have used AI in your everyday life. For businesses and organisations, there are a dizzying number of AI applications, from customer-service chatbots to financial-market analysis.

All of these examples employ forms of machine learning. Its simplest version, known as supervised machine learning or predictive analytics, is basically an advanced form of statistics, in which humans feed a computer algorithm with training data to enable it to infer things about other data.

The more you train an algorithm, the better its predictions get.

DigitalMR, a company based at Workspace’s Vox Studios in Vauxhall,

uses machine learning to “listen” to online conversations for market-research purposes.

Various algorithms are in play at once.

One eliminates “noise” around certain keywords (for example, if you’re interested in posts mentioning Apple products, you don’t want results involving fruit). Other algorithms analyse text and annotate it with sentiment – positive, negative, neutral – and emotion such as love, hate, joy and sadness.

DigitalMR has also won several grants from Innovate UK, the government-affiliated innovation agency, to develop new machinelearning models.

These include the magic captioner, a tool that can not only recognise a logo of a brand within an image, but also automatically caption it with a sentence that describes what’s in the image, for example: “This is a group of friends drinking Coca-Cola at a picnic”. This capability enables brands to research from social media photos when and how their products are being consumed without having to actually look at the images.

AI-generated image captioning is cutting-edge stuff. “Apart from us, only Google and Microsoft have this capability right now,” says Michalis Michael, DigitalMR’s CEO. “It is not easy to synthesise the objects in an image and come up with a sentence that makes sense.”

homeworkmagazine

An artist’s representation of computer scientist Alan Turing

workspacegroup.co.uk

“Businesses can be using AI to crunch data a lot faster and reach insights that they couldn’t get their hands on before” Michalis Michael, CEO at DigitalMR

Deep learning

For its more advanced AI technology, DigitalMR uses a technique known as deep learning. This uses neural networks, which, as their name suggests, mimic the structure of the human brain and offer far more exciting and often unpredictable outcomes than “linear” algorithms trained by humans.

Deep learning can also be unsupervised, which essentially means that the machine can learn by itself. London-based company DeepMind caused a sensation in 2016 when its human-trained AlphaGo computer beat Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol at the board game Go. Last October, the company unveiled a new version, AlphaZero, which

DigitalMR is at the cutting edge of machine learning in market research, says its CEO, Michalis Michael

22

uses unsupervised machine learning. It beat the previous version 100-0. Neural networks are the future, paving the way towards strong AI, but for the moment there’s still a lot to discover about how they work and what they can do.

So what sort of businesses can take advantage of machine learning? In short, any business that needs to process data.

“Everybody deals with data and there’s lots of it around any business,” says Michael.

“So businesses can be using AI to crunch data a lot faster and reach insights that they couldn’t get their hands on before.” Machine learning makes it possible to sift through and find patterns in quantities of data that would take humans years to examine manually. In

Left: The MyDrive office at The Leather Market Below: Gavin Heavyside, CTO at MyDrive

order to find out which topics are driving conversations on social media, DigitalMR is able to drill down into millions of posts and know what they are about without reading them. “Ten years ago you would have had to read it,” says Michael. “Now we can push millions of posts through these tools in a few minutes and the posts come out on the other side annotated with emotions, sentiment or topics.”

MyDrive Solutions is another Workspace customer that uses machine learning to make sense of big data. The company, which is headquartered at The Leather Market in London Bridge, collects and analyses data from drivers’ smartphones to understand how safely they are driving. It creates scores for different aspects of driving, such as acceleration, braking, cornering or speed, and gives

workspacegroup.co.uk

them to the driver (via a smartphone app) and the driver’s insurance company. The aim is to encourage safer driving, which leads to lower premiums for the motorist and fewer payouts for the insurer. It’s the familiar “black box” insurance model, but using smartphone technology rather than onboard hardware. “The tech in an iPhone or Android is way in advance of anything inside the old black boxes fitted in cars,” says Gavin Heavyside, MyDrive’s CTO. “You’ve got GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes, all kinds of sensors to understand when and how people are driving.”

Harvesting this huge volume of secondby-second information from thousands of drivers is one thing, but analysing it is another – and that’s where machine learning comes in. MyDrive also uses machine learning to exclude data that

does not come from a car (similar to health apps that can tell whether someone is walking or running). It is also currently developing an AI model to guard against users being dangerously distracted by their phone while driving.

As for deep learning, MyDrive’s data scientists are researching its use in autonomous-vehicle control systems and computer vision, such as automatic detection of road signs and speed limits. Although some businesses are already employing deep learning in live products, Heavyside says that for now “there are a lot more people talking about it or experimenting with it, than using it, but that is changing fast”.

In the not-too-distant future, emerging technology known as quantum computing will allow data to be crunched even faster.

Heavyside is keeping an eye on how this

23

artificial intelligence

“Businesses that don’t adopt it are going to be overtaken by businesses that do – it’s like an arms race” Doug Ayres, MD at Filament

Above: Doug Ayres, MD at Filament at Cargo Works contemplates a robot-friendly future Right: Ben Gancz prizes human warmth

24

“step change in computing capability” progresses, but it may have its downsides.

“It introduces some challenges because it probably compromises all of the encryption that is currently in mainstream use.”

Until recently, machine learning was either too expensive or impossible for small and medium-sized businesses to get their hands on. These days it’s not only accessible; it’s fast becoming an imperative. “Businesses that don’t adopt it are going to be overtaken by businesses that do – it’s like an arms race,” says Doug Ayres, MD at Filament, an agency that advises and implements machinelearning techniques for clients from its office at Workspace’s Cargo Works in Waterloo.

Filament has devised conversational interfaces (chatbots) for clients including Deutsche Telekom and HSBC in America, enabling them to automate tasks in a way that simply wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago. It is currently working on a suite of tools that will allow companies to create their own machine-learning models without the need for in-house data scientists – making AI even more accessible for SMEs.

Like humans do

However, AI is no silver bullet, Ayres warns. We’re a “long way off general AI”, and so for now at least, it’s all about “computers and humans working together to do things better”.

Ben Gancz, Director at Qumodo, would agree on the importance of compatibility.

The company, which is based at The Print Rooms in Southwark, focuses on human interaction with AI, particularly in the defence, law-enforcement and medical sectors. One of its projects uses AI technology to help adults and children remove explicit images of themselves from the internet, saving police and moderators time. As well as developing AI tech itself, which has also been funded by Innovate UK, Qumodo is researching human psychology in order to integrate AI better into human teams. “There is maximum hype around AI at the moment,” says Gancz, “But it won’t meet people’s expectations unless there’s more investment into interfaces and getting people to have confidence in these technologies.”

homeworkmagazine

Ben Gancz, Director at Qumodo, The Print Rooms

“We are horrified by the thought that a driverless car might ever crash, but somehow okay with the idea that human errors cause crashes all the time” At the moment we have unrealistic expectations that AI will be 100% foolproof. We are horrified by the thought that a driverless car might ever crash, while somehow okay with the idea that human errors cause crashes all the time. “People have an inf lated expectation of what AI can do, and when it doesn’t do that it can really turn people off,” says Gancz. The challenge is getting people to “appropriately calibrate their trust” in AI – to have confidence in it, but not too much. “Policemen and soldiers need to really know whether what they’re being told is a good idea or not. We don’t want people to blindly trust it.”

What about the tasks that no longer require any human interaction? The loss of jobs to AI is already happening, and is a major ethical issue that needs to be explored further. “Machines are going to take over a lot of repetitive tasks that people get paid for now,” says Ayres. Many fear that technology will make people redundant, depress wages and lead to a stagnation in living standards unless we take action now.

workspacegroup.co.uk

So how concerned should we be about the rise of the robots? Last year, Facebook had to shut down a pair of its AI robots after they reportedly invented their own language. Although something of an AI evangelist, Michalis Michael can’t rule out the possibility of the machines taking over. “We should be very careful not to get to a Terminator-type scenario,” he says.

“Politicians should start discussing the legal and ethical frameworks around AI because at the moment there aren’t any.”

Others believe that our fears about AI and automation have been overstated.

“Technology automates tasks, rather than jobs,” says Benedict Dellot, co-author of The Age of Automation, a report commissioned by the Royal Society of Arts. “If a worker loses one task to automation, it’s likely that another will come along and replace it.”

Dellot was a panel speaker at Workspace’s Rise of the Bots Business Insight Dinner in February. He sees potential for AI to create jobs in the IT sector, and to complement workers, rather than replace them. For example, AI models can help doctors reach

diagnosis faster, or farmers to detect and treat crop diseases.

Gancz is also optimistic. While acknowledging that machines will inevitably become superintelligent, he doesn’t think this will necessarily lead to our destruction or enslavement. He believes that in a world of automation, people will value human interaction all the more, and our desire for human experiences might see an expansion of, for example, the services industry. “People have coffee machines in their house that make very good coffee but they still love going to coffee shops and paying five quid for someone to make it for them,” he says. “It’s the human connection that makes it valuable.”

There may be scary moments ahead, but whether you’re terrified or excited by AI, it seems unlikely to be a flash in the pan.

Businesses should embrace its potential or risk being left behind. ww Are you an AI fan? Tell us how your business uses AI by tweeting @WorkspaceGroup #homeworkmag

25

RISE OF THE BOTS Chatbots or “conversational interfaces” were among the trends up for discussion at Workspace’s Business Insight Dinner at The Leather Market on 20th February. The WBI dinner programme invites Workspace customers to hear experts discuss the hottest topics in business in an informal networking atmosphere. First up at the Rise of the Bots evening were Benedict Dellot and Dr Matthew Fenech, who discussed the impact of automation on society. After dinner, an expert panel shared their experience of developing chatbots, co-bots and robots. The event, which attracted an audience of more than 100, was chaired by Phil Westcott, a Managing Director at Filament. Here are some exciting discoveries from the chatbot world that we took away from the event.

How will bots transform customer relationships?

“People are very forgiving of bots when they go wrong – if they’re upfront that they’re a bot” Jacob Tomlinson, Lead Engineer at the Met Office

26

Chatbots enable businesses to start ongoing relationships with their customers. This is revolutionary, says Rory McElearney. “Let’s say you’ve got a Facebook pop-up messenger on your website. Not only can you sell to people and inform them, but during the process of say, a package being delivered, you can be messaging them, following up with them, gaining really high-quality feedback from them. It’s an absolute sea change in the relationship between the customer and the business, and it’s one that’s going to completely change the world.”

Is it possible for bots to gauge customers’ moods?

Filament has recently developed a customer

service agent for Deutsche Telekom that comes with emotional empathy built in. “The bot tries to figure out if the person it’s talking to is happy, angry or sad and tailors the conversation accordingly,” says McElearney, Conversational Interfaces Lead at Filament.

Do we really want bots to be more human?

Alan Turing, the father of computer science, imagined a machine being able to convince a human that it was another human – the famous Turing Test. However, according to Jacob Tomlinson, who is developing a weather chatbot for the Met Office, chatbots should have personality but not try to pass themselves off as human.

“People are very forgiving of bots when they go wrong – if they’re upfront about the fact that they’re a bot”.

How can bots help you breathe easy?

Asthma suffers can breathe easy. Filament is working with a pharmaceutical client that produces inhalers, and is prototyping a chatbot that lets you know if you’re entering an area of poor air quality. “It gives you real-time prompts if you’re going to have an asthma attack,” says Westcott. ww If this has whetted your appetite, you can watch video recordings of both panel discussions by visiting workspace.co.uk/WBI/Rise-Of-TheBots. And to find out more about the WBI dinner programme, visit workspace.co.uk/community

homeworkmagazine

Familiar sight?

You’re busy. Very busy. So the last thing on your mind is finding a trustworthy cleaning company to keep on top of your office chaos.

Olivers Mill is Workspace’s trusted cleaning operator and for good reason. ISO accredited for quality and with a DBS-checked workforce, you’ll love the fact that you can pick and choose the services you want. No equipment is stored at your office, there’s secure access management and no long contracts.

Get a quote for the services you need by getting in touch via workspace@oliversmill.co.uk

Because life is too short for messy offices!

oliversmill.co.uk/workspace Cleaners are paid the Living Wage which is more than the Minimum Wage, and all rubbish and recycling is processed in line with the Workspace Waste Strategy

robotics

ROBOT READY Meet the robots of tomorrow that can give a helping hand in the workplace and at home in the kitchen. The feared robot rebellion will just have to wait, writes Guardian contributor Rich McEachran By 2030, nearly a third of all jobs in the UK may have been lost to automation.

Manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, as well as administrative and support services, are most at threat, according to the gloomy prediction from audit firm PwC. Such is the fear that humans could be pushed out of the workplace that a “robot tax” has been called for by Jeremy Corbyn, Bill Gates and the European Union.

However, imagine a world where not only are robots commonplace, they also boost our industries – helping us to work faster and smarter. Taxed robots or not, the reality is that the automated future is unlikely to be anything like that depicted in dystopian fiction and on the big screen.

The chances are there will be no scary system that takes over the human race, like Skynet from the Terminator franchise, but rather machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI), and instead of having to compete for jobs with robots, we can collaborate with them.

Take assembly lines. Whether an independent food brand or a manufacturer of niche goods, speed is of the essence when it comes to packing orders and ensuring timely delivery. However, it might be that the logistics leave much to be desired. Meet Workspace customer, Intelligent Robots.

Zheng Lin is the company’s Co-founder and CEO, based in The Biscuit Factory in Bermondsey. Lin and his team are developing RPuck, a self-driving robot

28

designed to be deployed in warehouses to transports goods between locations more easily. “Traditional warehouse automation solutions, such as conveyor belts, are incredibly painful to both implement and maintain. They’re pretty inefficient and rigid. There’s also no flexibility in the locations that goods can be moved between… and flexibility is key for dynamic logistics,” says Lin. RPuck has environmental awareness, thanks to a process known as sensor fusion, which means it can safely operate around human workers without bumping into them. Different sensors enable a robot to detect obstacles and avoid collisions. The more a robot learns about the environment it’s operating in, the better it will become at navigating it. “It’s also cost-effective, because our Robot-as-a-Service model means there’s no upfront investment for users and all maintenance and upgrading [of the software] is handled at our end,” Lin adds.

Maintenance can be done remotely, unlike maintaining and upgrading equipment like conveyor belts, which rely on a skilled engineer either to be on-site or called out. Beyond the warehouse, robots can help with intricate tasks that require extremely fine motor skills, such as product development and testing.

Rich Walker is Managing Director at Shadow Robot Company, based at Leroy House in Islington and Spectrum

House in Camden. The company sells dexterous robotic hands to other companies developing robots like Moley Robotics, which prototyped the first automated kitchen a few years ago and is expected to launch to consumers later this year.

Walker believes that robots have the potential to be more reliable and agile, although there is still some way to go.

However, with each attempt, a dexterous robotic hand becomes more nimble and adept at mastering tasks. These hands also have ultra-sensitive touch sensors built into the fingertips.

“Most robots have grippers and are able to pick up a specific object, but they can’t yet perform as well as humans. We have cognitive skills that make it easy for us to reach out and handle an object, even if we haven’t seen it before,” says Walker. “By using better physical hardware and building in AI and machine learning, we at Shadow are hoping to give robots the same abilities.”

Leaving complex and repetitive tasks in safe and capable robotic hands will allow companies to focus more of their efforts on the creative and moneymaking aspects of their business. At a TED talk in November, Sebastian Thrun, educator and entrepreneur at Google X, argued that once humans break the chains of dull, tedious work, we can unleash our full creativity. “I believe all of us are insanely creative,” he explained. “[AI] will empower us to turn creativity into action.” ww

“Robots can’t yet perform as well as humans.

We at Shadow are hoping to give robots the same abilities as humans” Rich Walker, MD at Shadow Robot Company, The Biscuit Factory

A working prototype from Shadow Robot Company

marketing Below: The ICCI 360 Arena, developed by Plymouth University in collaboration with Workspace customer Igloo Vision Bottom: Mike Follett

THE MARKETING MAESTROS Marketing is a curious discipline: half science, half craft, all about persuasion. It’s also in the middle of a revolution, as innovative new companies rewrite the rules. Ed Owen meets the Workspace customers driving the mutiny

30

homeworkmagazine

“We hope to democratise attention

technologies like eye tracking, so that anyone can use it, and make sense of it, anywhere” Mike Follett, MD at Lumen Research, ScreenWorks

Just 20 years ago, marketing was a very different discipline. Science played a minor role in the key brand and marketing decisions of the late 90s, more Mad Men, less Blade Runner. Today, it’s the sector most altered by the digital revolution as customers move to digital media, making them harder to find, while groundbreaking technologies turn the sector upside-down.

Marketing principles have not changed but the technologies and culture are unrecognisable. This was first driven by the tech giants like Google and Facebook, but it’s now pushed forward by smaller, more agile, entrepreneurial companies with a global reach, attracting some of the biggest brands on the planet to their innovative technologies and approach.

The science of selling

Take testing, for example. It’s one of the oldest principles of marketing. One of the most reliable ways to test your marketing is to see how people interact with it. Eye tracking is the gold standard; it is used by psychologists in laboratory experiments when testing concepts like attention, and it is used by marketers to help judge how well creative ads work.

Eye-tracking technologies monitor how our eyes move and absorb messaging like ads in a newspaper or on a computer screen. This type of testing gives the marketer reliable numbers with which to work. It can show how different versions of an ad might draw or repel the eye. Eye tracking is also used extensively in improving the user experience of websites because it shows how the eye moves around a page and thus how the user is drawn into every part of a website.

The first eye-tracking experiments were conducted about 100 years ago. Back then, subjects often had their heads in a Clockwork Orange-style vice so their eye movements could be monitored accurately.

Today eye tracking is much easier thanks

workspacegroup.co.uk

to the use of special computers and cameras to track eye movements, usually in controlled conditions. It is still as valuable, but it is costly. What if it was cheaper?

Mike Follett is Managing Director at Lumen Research, an eye-tracking specialist based at Workspace’s ScreenWorks in Islington. Lumen has revolutionised this kind of research by developing software that can turn a phone or a laptop into an eye-tracking kit. Follett says, “We developed the tech to turn webcams into eye-tracking cameras. The software uses a complicated algorithm to track the glints reflected from your eyes.” This feat has maintained the accuracy of the testing – and reduced costs for eye tracking tenfold.

Moving out of the laboratory allows for an increase in scale, but cost and time input have plummeted.

Follett elaborates, “It gives us the chance to compare demographics: mothers and their kids, or people from different regions or different countries.

Intent can be tested. We can do studies anywhere in the world, but from here. It’s hugely scalable. We hope to democratise attention technologies like eye tracking, so that anyone can use it, and make sense of it, anywhere.”

360 virtual view

Another cutting-edge technology adopted enthusiastically by marketers now, but that has had a slow development burn, is virtual reality (VR). When the film The Lawnmower Man explored VR back in 1992, it was deemed science fiction. Today it’s in the home – and the VR industry is growing at an exponential rate. The sector was estimated to be worth around $2 billion in 2016, and it is projected to grow to $26.9 billion by 2022, according to Zion Market Research.

The appeal comes partly from the mind-bending immersion in virtual

31

“Brands are having to work a lot harder, combining different elements with human interaction” Phil Watton, MD at Lodestar

worlds, but also from faster and cheaper processing power and complex components taken from mobile phones, which have come down massively in price. The familiar headsets are not the only way to experience VR. Workspace customer Igloo Vision takes a different approach, eschewing the headsets for a wrap-around experience in a domed structure that can suck in the senses for larger groups of people.

Igloo’s Head of Communications, Peter Halliday, based at Parma House in Wood Green, explains, “Our company has been around for about 10 years and has always been of interest to brands for different types of experiential marketing. Then, Facebook acquired [VR company] Oculus and everything changed. Suddenly VR was hot, and people were creating 360 and VR content.”

However, headsets have limitations. The user has to sit down and the headset has a tether, which limits to around 90 degrees what the user can see. Igloo’s domes overcome these problems, transforming the experience from singular to shared, thus creating a much more powerful experience: shared VR. “This way the audience engages in the whole horizon,” says Halliday.

The human edge

In fact, all forms of experiential marketing have been transformed, according to Phil

32

Watton, MD at Lodestar, a Workspace customer based at The Light Box, which manages special experiential campaigns for large brands. “The idea is to create experiences that produce valued moments – giving something to those participating, whether digitally or not. Brands are having to work a lot harder, combining different elements with human interactions,” he says.

Lodestar adopts various new technologies to give something special and memorable to the consumer, but the technology alone isn’t enough. “After a while, things become run-of-the-mill to people. One example is [virtual-reality headset] Oculus Rift, which gives a very insular, singular experience. Sharing experiences makes them more effective.

You have to make experiences as dynamic and engaging as possible. It’s all about the creative,” he says.

The automotive sector is a good example. Potential customers can find out a huge amount about a car from specialist magazines, TV shows and websites, so marketing campaigns have to give something extra. That something extra could be an experiential campaign at an airport or in a shopping centre, for example.

You would see the car sitting there in all its glory, with the added digital element of something like VR to help bring the car to life. Customers can take a virtual tour of

the car, and modify things like the exterior colour and the wheel rims. Even with the exciting technology add-ons, however, human presence can still have the edge, particularly for luxury or high-end vehicles.

Watton explains, “We could use professional drivers, for example – they are seen as an expert third party, particularly if the car is high performance or 4x4.” These drivers would be paid to talk to customers about the car, or to staff the stand.

Using real people has an advantage: people make these experiential campaigns work. Another example where humans improve the customer experience can be demonstrated by The Chat Shop, based at Workspace’s Q West. The Chat Shop manages communications for brands using a range of channels such as email, social, chat and more. It has discovered a nearperfect way to communicate with people: other people.

According to The Chat Shop’s Head of Marketing, Seán Cotter, research it conducted last year came to a simple conclusion. “We know that the human touch in digital means empathy. That’s what can’t be replaced by bots, scripts and AI. Empathy is about moving away from transactional experiences and towards the perfect experience. 73% of customers want to speak to a human and have an empathetic experience when they have a problem or

homeworkmagazine

marketing

Left: Chatting at The Chat Shop Below left: Experience the future at FutureFest festival

Meet the pioneers at Workspace LUMEN RESEARCH ScreenWorks Cutting-edge eye tracking for the BBC, Chanel, Unilever, Vodafone, Tesco, BT lumen-research.com

make a transaction. Digital needs a human heart to be effective,” he says.

That’s not to say that technology doesn’t inform The Chat Shop’s business – it’s at the heart of it, giving the handler useful insights into the customer. “We have technology that allows us to pinpoint where a customer is on a website and evaluate where they are in their journey, so that our team can reach out with a message that’s suited to that person’s unique point of view,” he says.

It is perhaps a reflection of our digitally obsessed world that customers frequently believe they are talking to bots, not people, and give handlers their own version of the Turing Test to try and catch them out.

Results are compelling. The Chat Shop says its methods boost satisfaction to 99% and marketing leads by half.

The future is bright

Quite what post-Brexit Britain will look like remains uncertain, but what is certain is that innovative companies like Igloo, Lumen, Lodestar and The Chat Shop are precisely the kinds of businesses that will keep the economy buoyant.

Lumen’s Follett says, “We have to have home-grown technologies we can export to every corner of the world. Pre-orders for our software product, which has not even officially launched, has meant we

workspacegroup.co.uk

have not needed to do any marketing.

People are coming to us.”

Halliday agrees, and says that the UK has a definite edge in creative services.

“We have noticed that the UK has the best content creators in the world. We have offices in the US, in New York and LA, but the content creators are not as good as the ones here. British companies like Visualise, Rewind, Framestore are all used by US clients who come here for world-class marketing, digital and post-production services,” he says.

Workspace’s shared working environment is a boon for creative services like marketing. Follett draws an analogy with the famous lobby built in animation studio Pixar’s headquarters, designed for people from different disciplines to run into one another and share ideas.

“The Workspace environment is really helpful for us,” he says. “We constantly bump into people who come from very different companies. This helps us because it’s interesting to have friendly discussions with other people from dance companies, fashion, modelling agencies, all these different areas, and hone our pitch.”

Marketing may be changing but the next changes are driven by companies with cutting-edge technologies who work for the biggest brands on the planet, based not far from you. ww

The Chat Shop Q West Next-generation customer service for Hitachi, Yell, Skoda, Mercedes-Benz, Curzon Cinemas thechatshop.com Lodestar The Light Box Emotional experiences for Fiat, Philips, Jeep, Alfa Romeo, Nvidia computing lodestar.co.uk Igloo Vision Demo centre at Parma House Immersive and shared VR for Adidas, Toyota, Médecins Sans Frontières, GSK, UNHCR, Ford igloovision.com

Igloo Vision

33

neuroscience

the neural network Smart businesses are swotting up on the brain’s inner workings to assess employees and customers alike, in order to find the most suitable employees and craft the best customer offering. Discover more about the psychological tools that can divulge details as diverse as employees’ ethical preferences and reveal the biases that feed the human mind and shape behaviour, writes cognitive scientist turned journalist, Stav Dimitropoulos

CGI render of a neural network

“Emotions are powerful and more likely to have an impact on decisions than rational calculation�

David Hall, Executive Director at Behaviour Change

neuroscience

“Loss is more important

The previous century witnessed the explosion of the science of psychology and the early tendrils of groundbreaking fields like behavioural economics and neuroscience. The age-old world of business was swept along It was Adam Smith who first coined the theory of the “invisible hand” – the idea that when we make a self-interested decision, say to buy a fancy dress and a designer handbag, it gives a helping hand to the wider economy.

From the “invisible hand” evolved the concept of the “invisible mind” – the (still) uncharted territory of emotion and reason, of feelings and logic, of hidden desires and buried intentions – to explain why we might buy that particular dress or handbag.

36

Today, science can dive deep into the workings of the human mind. It can put the brain under scans to see which parts of it light up when we see an advertisement.

It can design tests that will predict which employee is least susceptible to corruption.

It can even take advantage of the mind’s desire for simplicity, to help businesses and organisations design campaigns that will most readily be adopted by people.

And for the scientists and experts who are leading these advances, we are only just seeing the beginning.

BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS: No, we are not perfectly rational customers – and successful businesses know that.

To understand the way customers think, first take a brief sidestep into the world of

award-winning economic theory. Last year, Richard Thaler won the Nobel prize for economics for “providing a more realistic analysis of how people think and behave when making economic decisions”. A man in lifelong pursuit of behavioural economics, Thaler proved that people are predictably irrational in ways that transcend economic theory. He was not the first to speak about human irrationality.

Fifteen years earlier, two psychologists named Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky also won a Nobel prize, pointing out how prone humans are to bad judgment and rigid thinking. Should we want to improve our reality, we had better start improving our own way of grasping it, Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory said, in a nutshell.

This theory not only went on to shape behavioural economics, but also to provide

homeworkmagazine

than winning”

Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University

Brain neurons rendered in CGI

fascinating insights into what influences people’s decisions as purchasers.

“Many of these doctrines can help businesses of today understand what clients want,” says Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University in St Louis. “For example, one of prospect theory’s central biases is loss aversion, which says that loss is more important than winning.”

Imagine your business is Netflix. You give your clients a free trial period of three months, after which it is up to them to decide whether they should switch to paid subscription or not. This means that after three months of enjoying Netflix, they are now faced with the pain of losing it.

Add temporal discounting to the mix, and watch sales spike. This is the phenomenon that if you anticipate

workspacegroup.co.uk

the value of a reward at a much later stage than initially promised, the wow factor dies down.

Padoa-Schioppa explains, “Let’s say you want to buy an electric car from Toyota.

What do you do first? You seek information, so Toyota must make sure you know it sells electric cars through advertising. But then comes the knowledge of temporal discounting. We tend to defer payments, which means that if Toyota wants to make the sell, it must be aware that the human mind finds it much more preferable to pay little by little, in instalments.”

What role does emotion play in customer engagement? Brand-attachment theory says that consumers are likely to prefer emotionally or culturally significant products. Marketers must therefore know how to evoke soulful emotions like joy,

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his groundbreaking research on behavioural economics

37

A 3D render of the brain

“Humans can be fickle - customer loyalty is not guaranteed for life”

David Hall, Executive Director at Behaviour Change

38

sorrow and fear in order to secure an emotionally charged bond between the customer and their brand.

David Hall is Executive Director at Behaviour Change. Based in Workspace’s Archer Street Studios in Soho, the not-forprofit social enterprise addresses major social and environmental challenges by developing ideas that help people embark upon positive action.

“Emotions are powerful and more likely to have an impact on decisions than rational calculation. A good example would be World Wildlife Fund, whose association with iconic animal species and a cute panda logo is a far more effective money-raising tool than rational arguments about climate change or species depletion,” Hall says.

Yet humans can be fickle. Even if businesses establish a long-term emotional relationship or attachment to a brand, customer loyalty is not guaranteed for life.

Successful brands are those that tap into another “source of gold”, says Hall, namely mental shortcuts. Our brains use these quick and intuitive algorithms to give a rough answer to a reasoning question in a fairly easy way (if you want examples of such

shortcuts, look no further than educated guesses or guesstimates).

Hall advises that brands should focus on those priceless moments of decision that lead to impulse purchases, rather than solely building long-term loyalty. The reason?

Shortcuts ease the load on your brain when it has to decipher cognitive problems, and what better than offering less homework to a brain that’s constantly bombarded by nonstop waves of information?

“An effective brand might be one that makes it easy for you to do the thing you want to do, such as Uber; cuts through complexity like Apple; or is simply the thing you’ve done so many times before it becomes a habit, like the toothpaste you buy,” Hall says. “They all help people shortcut a decision by cutting out the need for effortful thought.”

THE POWER OF PSYCHOMETRIC TESTS: Hire better staff that stick around and support the team.

It is estimated that the wrong hiring decision can set organisations back by 30%–176% of the annual salary of each vacant position.

Perhaps that explains why the popularity

homeworkmagazine

AT WORKSPACE WE LIKE TO GET PEOPLE TOGETHER

WBI Dinner Westbourne Studios

 House of VOGA class, Pill Box

 Knowledge Peers, Feeding your Business Collaboration, Innovation and Creativity, Westbourne Studios

Our main priority is to help your business thrive through providing buzzing communities and support networks There’s always plenty of business and social events happening here at Workspace, designed to make networking easy, inspire fresh motivation and provide you with the opportunity to learn new skills.

 The Record Hall Launch Party

You can also host your own business events in our striking atrium spaces, check them out at workspace.co.uk/ meeting-rooms/ event-space

That’s not to say we’re all work and no play, with pub quizzes, yoga and cocktail making nights aplenty.

See what we’ve got coming up at

workspace.co.uk/ community/events

neuroscience Right: Brain cells colourised via computer to be visible microscopically Below: Talking neuroscience at the WBI dinner (l-r) Joseph Devlin, James Turner, James Naylor, Andy Goll

of psychometrics – tools that measure psychological abilities and aptitudes – has exploded in the last two decades in all stages of the recruitment process.

“All humans are susceptible to erroneous judgments,” says Sabina Socias, UK Branch Manager at Central Test, a Workspace customer in Kennington Park.

This international publisher provides psychometric assessments and training to meet challenges in the human-resources sector. Such challenges include trying to avoid wasting money and resources training a recruit who doesn’t fit the role; helping those employees who prove indispensable for the business to juggle their personal and professional life; and helping business owners manage a pool of diverse employees.

“Psychometrics bypass the biases and stereotypes we all have and allow for a fairer assessment,” Socias explains. They allow companies to make more responsible assessments, and thus to be more socially responsible.” However, they are also highly adjustable.

The latest trend is to bypass traditional personality assessments in favour of situational-judgment tests, to see how well a candidate fits into the company culture.

40

These types of psychological aptitude tests put people in work-related scenarios and assess their reactions. “This is a more valid assessment of people’s abilities and behaviour,” says Socias.

Situational-judgment tests make it easier to see if an individual fits with the company culture because they place them in a particular context where they have to project themselves and say how they would react or behave, whereas traditional questionnaires ask about past behaviour.

Central Test uses emotional-intelligence questionnaires, tests designed to measure how people understand, manage and interpret their own emotions, and those of others. These types of tests are mushrooming in popularity. Simultaneously, there is a huge shift in mentality in the workplace.

Previously, a sign of a good employee was a loyal worker who had remained in a company for a long stretch of time. In 2018, nomads rule.

“We live in a culture where the new generation does not tend to stay in one position for long. You have to change jobs perhaps every two or five years to show that you have variety in your resume, but this makes companies suffer financially. It is very

homeworkmagazine

“ Psychometrics bypass the biases and stereotypes we all have and allow for a fairer assessment�

Sabina Socias, UK Branch Manager at Central Test

neuroscience

“It is very expensive to hire and train people, and then lose them” Sabina Socias, UK Branch Manager at Central Test

Keen and committed employees are not a panacea for businesses.

Ethics matter too. Ethicsassessment tools are fiercely on the rise

Above: Testing at Neuro-Insight Right: Heather Andrew, CEO of Neuro-Insight

42

expensive to hire and train people, and then lose them,” says Socias.

Therefore, retaining committed and engaged employees is of the essence, which is why company culture and employee wellbeing are so important. Workplace success is no longer only about chunky salaries; it is also about good working conditions in a balanced environment.

Still, keen and committed employees are not a panacea for businesses. Ethics matter too. Ethics-assessment tools, which are used in onboarding to measure integrity at work or whether employees are likely to engage in unethical behaviour, are fiercely on the rise. Central Test has created a tool that evaluates attitudes towards counterproductive workplace behaviours, because attitudes are a strong predictor of behaviour. A candidate who tolerates or finds it normal to engage in unethical work behaviour is more likely to engage in unethical behaviour themselves. “We

also look at people’s attitudes towards other people’s behaviours and towards their own behaviour, so we can see whether they are likely to tolerate unethical behaviour in other people or to tolerate it in their own behaviour,” Socias says.

“This tool could not be more modern,” she continues. “It speaks to the problems of bullying, corruption and discrimination we are widely seeing today.”

FUTURE TRENDS: Will neuroscience corner the market?

What’s the last frontier for humans to explore? Artificial intelligence? Immortality?

Space? The ocean? Or is it the 1.4kg mass of grey and white matter that fills the upper part of your bony head? If you went with the last option, you are certainly a fan of neuroscience. Neuroscience studies how the nervous system develops, how it is built and what it does. It focuses on the question of how neural layers underlie certain human

Join our fast-growing network of creative co-working clubs

As part of Club Workspace we’ve been able to immerse ourselves in an environment of like-minded professionals, which has opened up new ways of thinking and doing.

It was really easy to get started. We just rocked up with our laptops – that was all.

Jimmy Williams, Urban Jungle, Club Workspace, Kennington Park

19 London locations

Business grade Wi-Fi

Connect with over 4,000 businesses

Bursting events calendar

Bookable meeting rooms

Rolling monthly membership

Find out more at

workspace.co.uk/co-working

neuroscience Heather Andrew, CEO at Neuro-Insight

“So much decision-making is based on processes that happen subconsciously”

Above: Joseph Devlin, Head of Experimental Psychology at University College London

44

(and animal) behaviours. Neuroscience has made impressive leaps over the past years; businesses are increasingly looking into the brain’s foldings to investigate what makes customers tick. “This is because we know now that so much decision-making is based on processes that happen subconsciously,” says Heather Andrew, CEO at NeuroInsight, a world leader in neurosciencebased market research, based at Workspace’s Metal Box Factory.

“Let’s say you ask people how many times they went to the cinema last month or what the name of their dog is. People should be able to tell you those sorts of things, but when you start talking to them about the motivations behind their behaviour, then things change. Often people just don’t know. And, even if they know, they might not be willing to tell you. And that is where neuroscience comes in.”

Neuro-Insight uses Steady State Topography (SST), a technology that records and measures electrical signals in the brain in order to build a second-bysecond picture of brain activity. “We can then link that to behaviour. We can identify the cognitive processes that correlate with decision-making in purchase behaviour.

And we know that the brain’s responsive behaviour can be more accurate than spoken responses,” says Andrew.

Joseph Devlin, Head of Experimental Psychology at University College London, is in firm agreement. “Neuroscience can help tackle problems that arise when businesses target only the conscious spheres of human activity, which are full of irrationality,” Devlin says.

SST is used to assess how well advertising works. A classical study on smoking highlights its advantages. In 2011, researchers Emily Falk and Elliot Berkman designed three different advertising campaigns to get people to stop smoking.

They brought a normal focus group together and asked members to say which campaign was the most effective. They then put them in magnetic resonance imaging – a medical imaging technique that produces threedimensional, detailed, anatomical images –

and watched their brain activity during the time they watched the three ads.

Devlin explains, “If you asked them which ad was more interesting, they answered that A was better than B, which was better than C, but if you looked at their brain activity in terms of the most rewarding experience, the best option was B followed by C followed by A. They repeated the procedure with different groups and when the time came to test these ads in the real world with hundreds of thousands of people, they found that the results based on the brain responses were more accurate than those based on spoken responses.”

So neuroscience finds our brain responses to be a far superior truth index than what comes out of our mouths, but which are the specific parts of the brain that drive these responses, say in the arena of the economy? The whole brain is involved in purchase behaviour, but some areas are particularly important for predicting it.

The limbic system in the middle of the brain is the most ancient set of brain structures that mediates our emotions and memories. Devlin elaborates, “This is involved in emotional processing and also to some extent in reward processing.

If somebody walks up to you on the street and gives you £10 just because they are nice, you have a shot of dopamine in that alley, a brain chemical that will indicate an unexpected reward.”

Then there is the very front section of the brain – the medial prefrontal cortex – which is masterful at controlling cognitive functions such as planning, attention, problem-solving, error-monitoring, decision-making, social cognition and working memory. “This seems to be a particularly important part of the brain for encoding how much you value a choice,” says Devlin. “If you love chocolate and somebody gives you chocolate, your medial cortex will appreciate that with a lot of activation.”

Devlin is quick to point out that these parts of the brain feed into both emotion and logic. This is because the limbic system includes some of the key emotional centres

homeworkmagazine

The test threw up some unwelcome surprises – and useful pointers

of the brain such as the amygdala. This almond-shaped structure is responsible for triggering the primordial fight-or-flight response. The limbic system is also attached to one of the most evolved regions of the brain, which is crucial for decision-making and digesting information, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

To understand brand attachment from a neuroscience standpoint, this is the area of the brain we need to examine. Devlin says, “When you choose to buy a product there are a couple of things going on in your brain. You have some kind of emotional attachment to the product you want to buy. You also have some sort of trust in it, trust that you are buying something you will like. Or perhaps it is a matter of habit.

All these are essentially subconscious processes. Your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex takes the relevant information and guides the decision you are going to make as a consumer.”

The brain works by association. If we get a tidbit of information, we link it to other tidbits we perceive to be of the same type, explains Andrew. She says, “Think about what brands are. Imagine a place in our brains for brand. This is brand equity. It is a sum of all the experiences, all the ads we have seen, and what our friends have told us. If we were to produce the perfect ad, we should make sure first to stir emotion among people, and then to store it into memory.”

For all its glorious promise, the intersection between neuroscience and business does not come without its sceptics – surprisingly, from within neuroscience itself. Padoa-Schioppa is still uncertain about whether our knowledge of neuroscience is deep enough to influence marketing. “Our understanding is limited to how the brain influences economic decisions, as opposed to why. Assume we understand the brain processes behind temporal discounting. This will not tell us much about why people prefer to pay later than sooner,” he says.

Much of his reservation boils down to the fact that neuroscience is still in its infancy. It remains to be seen just how much the realm of neuroscience, fast on its way to becoming the dominant paradigm in psychology, will shake up the way we approach business today and in the future. ww Find out how you can train your brain to achieve peak performance, by turning to page 58 to have a look at our new wellbeing column

workspacegroup.co.uk

Testing times How powerful are psychometric tests? Farah Khalique checks her personality with Central Test. “How much do I really know about myself and what I’m like at work? I know that I’m driven, I hate working in an office and I daydream a lot. I’m at my happiest point in my career now, as a freelance journalist. Self-employment suits me” So I’m curious to see what these tests can tell me about myself that I haven’t already sussed out, and what my weak spots are. They aim to provide insights into things like job preferences, personal development, working styles and how to work best with colleagues.

Central Test employs advanced devices such as “forced choice” questions to assess personality types, and the tests can even spot if you are lying in your answers. I go in with an open mind, and leave with a wealth of information that has inspired me to make some life-changing decisions.

The three tests take no more than about 45 minutes to complete on my home computer, and involve a series of questions and a spatial-awareness test. Central Test’s psychometrician, Dr Luke Montuori, who features in My Workspace on page 66, walks me through the results.

I have a strong sense of self-worth and self-acceptance, and am very independent.

I’m a free thinker, highly intuitive and work best when not bound by strict rules and regulations. Journalism is a very good fit for me. Some of the other observations are a little harder to swallow. I “may appear unconcerned about the problems of others” and “may disguise the truth to achieve a particular objective”!

The most useful insights are around my interactions with colleagues and stress reactions. The report suggests I could be more open to teamwork, and recommends I take a step back when facing conflict, instead of jumping in with my gut reaction.

The results of my spatial-awareness test are a game changer. I have always known that I am geographically challenged and, at times, a careless driver, but my below-average score is the trigger I need to make a change. Montuori recommends the Peak Brain Training mobile app, developed by neuroscientists and game experts to challenge cognitive skills.

He says, “Use it or lose it. The brain is in some ways a muscle. If you use it a lot, you will build up those skills. Stick at it, and you will improve.”

This is the year I will work on my spatial awareness and conquer my driving demons.

“Use it or lose it. The brain is in some ways a muscle. If you use it a lot, you will build up those skills”

science in sport BeeLine bling for your bike

“Stats alone aren’t always enough”

THE NUMBERS GAME Data innovation is making sports and fitness more exciting and inclusive for fans and participants.

Arthur House meets the Workspace businesses adding the magic touch to sports with illuminating statistics We all know that exercise is good for us.

One in seven people in the UK are now gym members, and that number is rising. As the fitness industry has grown in recent years, so has the popularity of digital tools that enable us to monitor our progress. Wearable tech such as a FitBit, or mobile apps like RunKeeper or Strava, can record everything from distance to speed and heart rate to calories burned, allowing runners and cyclists to compete with their friends and share their achievements on social media.

However, stats alone aren’t always enough to keep us motivated. Although 38% of New Year’s resolutions involve doing more exercise, statistics from the Fitness Industry Association show that most people who join gyms in January have quit or stopped going after 24 weeks. The UK wastes almost £600 million a year on unused gym memberships.

We may have the technology in our smartphones to track and record everything,

46

but what we also need are ways of bringing it to life. How are forward-thinking businesses using data to tell exciting stories that engage sports and fitness fans around the globe?

Gamifying fitness

“When I started out running at university I found it really boring and painful, like a lot of people,” says Adrian Hon, CEO at independent games developer Six to Start, based at Workspace’s Spectrum House in Highgate. “I was surprised that no-one had made a really good game that made running more exciting and more motivating.”

Alongside writer Naomi Alderman, Hon conceived Zombies Run, an “audio adventure” that casts you, the runner, as one of the last survivors of a zombie apocalypse.

On a typical mission (there are 250 in total), players must collect supplies and outrun zombies while immersing themselves in an unfolding story featuring dozens of characters. Meanwhile, the app tracks your distance and pace, and plays your own music in the background. With more than one million players and more than 40 million kilometres logged online, it is by far the most popular smartphone fitness game ever made.

Hon puts the success of Zombies Run down to a number of factors – including its

early launch in 2012 and the sheer quality of writing (Alderman won the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction for her novel The Power in 2017). It’s a recipe for success that seems to have been hard to emulate. “People have tried to gamify fitness for the last decade but usually it just doesn’t work. Adding points, levels and badges doesn’t actually make the act of exercise more fun,” he says, noting that fads like the Wii Fit have come and gone over the years. “It takes a lot of good content and good game design.”

Get on yer bike

As well as running, we’re often told to ditch the car or public transport and get on our bikes instead. Apart from the danger posed to cyclists in a city like London, one thing that puts people off cycling is the difficulty of navigating while on two wheels. Having to stop frequently to consult your smartphone is inconvenient, and listening to Google Maps’ audio directions in headphones risks making you less aware of your surroundings.

What if cyclists could get where they needed to safely and smoothly, while having an adventure at the same time? Workspace customer BeeLine, based at The Biscuit Factory in Bermondsey, aims to offer exactly that. The company produces

homeworkmagazine

science in sport Adrian Hon, CEO at Six to Start

“People have tried to gamify fitness for the last decade…it takes a lot of good content and good game design” a stripped-back navigation device for your bike which, rather than guiding you by strict, turn-by-turn instructions, simply shows you an arrow telling you which direction to head in and the distance to your destination. It’s up to you to choose a route. “Rather than being a passenger, you are free to explore, lift your head up and enjoy your surroundings,” says Co-founder Tom Putnam. “The idea is to make navigation more fun, and about the journey.”

There’s nothing to stop you going down a dead end, so you need to keep your eyes open. For the less adventurous, BeeLine

Hungry for data

storytelling. The company, which is based at Kennington Park, was founded in 2008 as a spin-off from Hawk-Eye, whose well-known tracking technology is now integral to tennis, football and rugby.

“Hawk-Eye collects huge amounts of data – we have 10 cameras on a tennis court,” says Richardson. “At Pulselive we’re interested in what stories we can tell with that data.” The company has operators at sports events who work closely with producers and directors to find interesting nuggets of analysis. So if you’ve ever seen John McEnroe on TV at Wimbledon discussing the placement of Federer’s first

has a setting that takes you on a prescribed route, similar to Google Maps, but it’s not necessarily quicker. Indeed, in a city like London with a high density of roads, the “exploration” setting gets people to their destination on average 10% quicker than the prescribed routes.

Putnam hopes that by making the experience of cycling more fun, the health benefits will follow. With that in mind, he has recently launched an integration with Strava so that BeeLine users can measure their progress if they want to. However, it’s more about the enjoyment. In addition, apps like CycleStreets or Happy Maps maximise the “emotional gain” of a journey by taking you via fragrant flowers or beautiful architecture.

Zombies Run: Run in the real world, become a hero in another. Which mission will you choose to accept?

serves, this is thanks to the combination of Hawk-Eye technology and Pulselive’s datastorytelling capabilities.

When it launched, Pulselive initially sought to make live sport on TV more engaging by asking fans questions that they could vote on during broadcasts. Since then it’s diversified to help the world’s biggest leagues, organisations and clubs figure out how fans use digital media and consume content, to boost engagement rates and maximise profits. The English Premier League, World Rugby, International Cricket Council and Barcelona football club are just a few of Pulselive’s customers.

For the diehard fans, Pulselive provides the tools via apps and white-label solutions such as ESPN’s Courtcast, for them to

48

For sports fans, technology and data are at the heart of the experience, from goal-line decision systems to TV analysis or fantasy league apps. One of the biggest players is Stats, whose London office is at Workspace’s Vestry Street Studios in Hackney.

Having started out 35 years ago in the US as a sports-analytics company aimed at improving team performance, Stats discovered there was a huge appetite for data among fans and broadcasters too.

The company’s clients now include Premier League clubs, Google, Alexa and Snapchat. Stats collects data on more

than 45 different sports and 600 leagues worldwide to an astonishing level of detail – to take football alone, the company records players’ location; how many times they touch the ball; how many passes they complete; and how far they run. As with fitness statistics, however, the key is using the data to tell interesting stories. Stats’s data scientists combine the data gathered to build up a picture of different playing styles – one of the company’s USPs – while their editorial research team creates bespoke reports for clients.

Wyndham Richardson, MD at Pulselive, would agree that data is nothing without

homeworkmagazine

Left: Wyndham Richardson, MD at Pulselive, Kennington Park, believes that data is nothing without storytelling

“Hawk-Eye collects huge amounts of data – we have 10 cameras on a tennis court. At Pulselive, we’re interested in what stories we can tell with that data” Wyndham Richardson, MD at Pulselive

explore the data on their own, but this only amounts to 15–20% of fans, according to Richardson. “The other 80% want to be pushed information and have a story told for them,” he says.

The future of fandom

According to Richardson, the ubiquity and growing data capacity of smartphones will mean that federations, leagues and clubs have the opportunity to go directly to the fan, rather than through a broadcaster or media partner. And instead of paying a flat rate per month to get a sports channel on TV, for example, they’ll be able to “choose a particular club or event and get a really premium experience,” says Richardson.

This in turn will enable companies to target content at individuals based on their preferences, which will add value

workspacegroup.co.uk

for commercial partners. “Look at Netflix,” says Richardson. “The whole experience is augmented to focus on content they think you’re going to like. Sport is going in this direction too.”

For Cormac Bourne, General Manager UK at Stats, the big innovation on the horizon is OTT, or over-the-top media, in other words, internet sports streaming.

Tech giants like Amazon and Facebook are already starting to get involved. Rather than simply being broadcast into someone’s home, live streaming will allow content to be personalised to the user – for example, you might be able to select which camera angles you want, chat with your friends on built-in social media, and request stats during the match.

The other game changer will be VR. Virtual reality is already being used by

some of the more advanced clubs for training purposes, but we’re not far off a time when it could be used to replicate a live-match experience. Fans could buy VR season tickets, with infinite access to the best (virtual) seats in the house. Data will be central to this, in order to relay the positions and movements of players in real time to the VR environment. Over in the fitness sector, there’s also the potential to use virtual reality at the gym. “We’re doing some research into that but it’s early days,” says Hon. Could sweaty headsets be the only thing preventing data from taking over sports completely? Let’s see what the future holds. ww Read about how virtual reality is changing the way we play mobile games on page 60

49

health

“If our gut isn’t happy, the rest of our body isn’t either – including our mind”

SHAPE UP WITH SCIENCE

We are bombarded daily with the latest fad diet, superfood or innovative workout promising “fast results in time for summer”. Is there a quick-fix, one-size-fits-all solution to achieving optimum health, or can we take a more scientific approach? Beauty and lifestyle journalist Mitra Wicks finds out how to radiate health from the inside out – without all the hot air

Be good to your gut

Perplexed about the best dietary approach?

Keeping our beloved gut happy is the long-term key to a happy and healthy life.

Nutrition and weight-loss coach Pippa Campbell explains, “What you eat can directly affect your gut bacteria, for better and for worse, and changes in your gut bacteria or microbiome can cause weight gain.” The link between weight and gut bacteria is an expanding area of research, and the links with weight are shocking.

Campbell elaborates, “Scientists know that if they insert the faeces of slim mice, which have lots of good bacteria, into obese mice, the obese mice become slim. When they insert the faeces of the obese mice into the slim mice’s guts, the slim mice become obese.”

Can gut problems be detrimental to our health in other ways? Obese people have been shown to possess a lower variety of good bacteria in their guts than people of a healthy weight, and they also have a higher incidence of gut problems. Campbell states that many symptoms can occur as a result of an unhealthy gut, such as “bloating, wind, catching colds, feeling emotionally low, sleep problems, acne, eczema, heartburn, muscle or joint problems.”

It appears that if our gut isn’t happy, the rest of our body isn’t either – including our mind, so maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle is essential for top-totoe wellness. Registered dietitian and consultant nutritionist Hala El-Shafie of Nutrition Rocks offers a simple approach.

Famed for her appearances on Channel 4’s How to Lose Weight Well and BBC 1’s Eat

50

Well for Less, El-Shafie believes the key to health is the “rainbow plate” – a vibrant dish of balanced food groups primarily made up of colourful vegetables. “The key to a healthy diet is combining fibre with a good mix of nutrients,” she says. “Simply work on ensuring that half of your plate is filled with vegetables, a quarter with complex carbs and the other quarter with lean protein.”

Probiotics and prebiotics

We’ve all heard about the merits of probiotics and prebiotics in helping to improve our gut function, but what exactly are they and how can they help us?

Probiotics are “good” bacteria that help keep the digestive system healthy by controlling the growth of bacteria that cause harm. These can be taken in supplement form or by consuming live yogurt containing lactobacillus or bifidobacterium bacteria.

Prebiotics are food for the probiotics – the more prebiotics we have, the better probiotics can do their job. Foods rich in prebiotics include asparagus, oats, legumes and bananas – a handy, office-friendly snack.

Nutritionist Cassandra Burns explains, “Our digestive tract contains trillions of bacteria – more than the total number of cells in our body. They start to colonise the gut as soon as we are born, through contact with bacteria in the birth canal and subsequently through the mother’s milk and other food and drink that is consumed.

Some are beneficial and some can be pathogenic (able to produce disease). If there is an imbalance of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria or other organisms [such as] yeasts, this is

known as dysbiosis and may be linked to some common digestive disturbances, as well as other health problems.”

It appears that a healthy diet is key to a healthy gut and that we need to ensure the correct balance of good and bad bacteria, but what exactly do the scientists think about this? A 2014 scientific study, “The impact of diet and lifestyle on gut microbiota and human health”, found that, although dietary intervention can induce significant change, it may not always be enough to engineer the changes in microbial populations that are conducive to better health. The study concludes, “The use of probiotics and other strategies may be required.”

Fitness fads or game changers?

A healthy diet is one piece of the health puzzle, but fitness is just as important.

However, with many of us stressed from high workloads and with little time to spare, we want solutions that work. DNA testing is fast becoming one of the most highly sought-after fitness assessments, with startup companies promising bespoke nutrition and fitness regimes specifically tailored to your body’s needs.

Parkhall-based Workspace customer Leanne Spencer, Founder at Bodyshot Performance, explains that DNA testing can help remove the guesswork about the type of nutrition plan that suits you and the type of exercise to which your body best responds.

She says, “Prior to this technology, you had to go through a process of trial and error, often taking weeks or months and

homeworkmagazine

“And yet AI is still big news�

Motion tracking during exercise

workspacegroup.co.uk

XX

health Below: Try your hand at Reformer Pilates

Snack on sauerkraut

Campbell’s top five tips to improve gut health 1 Eat whole, unprocessed, unrefined foods. One of the best ways to maintain gut health involves cutting out sugar and refined carbs, and jacking up gut-supporting fibre.

2 Fill your plate with vegetables and plant-based foods. Your gut bacteria will really love these high-fibre foods.

3 Go for good fats such as extra virgin olive oil.

4 Add fibre-rich foods like nuts, seeds and prebiotic foods.

5 Look for fermented foods. sauerkraut, kimchi, tempeh and miso contain good amounts of probiotics so your healthy gut bugs can be fruitful and multiply.

52

leading to frustration. Most of our DNA is predetermined, but our genes can be influenced by our environment, the food we eat, the air we breathe and the levels of stress we are under. Understanding this, and our own unique genetic make-up, means we can personalise our lifestyles to work with our genes and not against them.”

For those desiring a more bespoke, scientific approach to health and fitness, DNA testing may be the way forward, but what does it involve, and what is on offer in terms of solutions? Bodyshot Performance has created a series of products all based on the DNA test by partnering with DNAFit to offer an oral swab test that looks at 50 genes that relate to diet and fitness.

“Once we have the results, we can relate them to everything else we know about you – whether you’re vegan, for example, and your current fitness levels – and put together a personalised action plan that’s easy to follow.”

Bodyshot offers the DNA test as a standalone product, but it also includes blood testing (to be done at home using a fingerprick test) and wearable technology to track sleep and activity data.

DNA testing may be the answer for some of our problems, but other

solutions to common problems are more straightforward. Slouching over glaring computer screens and hunching over our smartphones day after day can lead to back problems, poor posture and high stress levels. A fitness routine that can help alleviate such problems is a true godsend.

Trending practices such as yoga and pilates can address both concerns – and help you end your hectic weekday with a mood-heightening boost. Back pain and stress are two of the most common health issues today, says Justin Rogers, Creative Director of Ten Health & Fitness, based at Workspace’s Barley Mow Centre in Chiswick. He says, “Ten’s trademark Dynamic Reformer Pilates is really effective against both. Not only is the workout ideal for correcting postural issues and strengthening the core, but the focus and concentration required make it an absorbing and empowering time-out from the pressure of work.”

Ten Health & Fitness has eight studios across London. Rogers says, “We keep class sizes deliberately small, so there’s plenty of personal attention and hands-on correction from the trainer. We’re able to regress or amend exercises to accommodate injuries or issues that a client may have.”

Left: Dominika Minarovic, Co-founder at Clean Beauty Co Clean Beauty is the UK’s leading natural beauty platform for the best in clean beauty news, recipes, reviews, tips and advice

Which supplement to choose?

“Consumers are seeking more natural, unprocessed ingredients in their cosmetics” Stay moisturised, naturally

In today’s toxin-bashing, clean-living society, we don’t just care about what we put into our body, we’re concerned with what we slather all over it too.

Dominika Minarovic, Co-founder of natural beauty platform Clean Beauty Co, based at The Record Hall, Workspace’s new centre in Farringdon, believes that the rise of health-aware, savvier consumers has led to an increase in “cleaner”, natural beauty products. “Consumers are seeking more natural, unprocessed ingredients in their cosmetics, which has given rise to cleaner formulations and more independent brands that aren’t held to a commercial bottom line,” she says.

Scientific studies show that fragrance and preservatives are a major cause of contact dermatitis. The preservatives to watch out for on your skincare product’s ingredients list include methylparaben, propylparaben and butylparaben. Minarovic says, “There are still many conflicting narratives around synthetic chemicals and their long-term usage effects, but it seems consumers are moving away from the conversation to natural alternatives.”

Moreover, natural brands offer environmental benefits. Mel Turkerman,

workspacegroup.co.uk

who founded organic skincare brand DermaNutri, explains the difference, “Natural brands tend to be more ethical and better for the planet, whilst being more compatible with the skin and less likely to cause reactions.”

Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the impact of skincare products on the environment. This year, the UK banned manufacturers from adding plastic microbeads from everyday personal care products like face scrubs and toothpaste.

These tiny pieces of polyethylene plastic pass through water-treatment processes and make their way into the ocean, harming marine life.

It seems that diet, fitness and skincare fads come and go, but the one factor that remains consistently important is the underlying science. As our understanding of science grows, so too does our approach to achieving optimum health from the inside out. ww

Choosing a probiotic supplement that is easy to take and contains the “right” levels of “good bacteria” can be tricky.

VSL#3 (£14.99 for a box of 10 sachets, vsl3.co.uk) contains 450 billion bacteria per sachet, including eight strains of beneficial live bacteria purposely selected, carefully cultivated and mixed proportionally to survive gastric acid, bile and pancreatic secretions.

Naturopathic nutritionist Amy Morris recommends Progurt (from £29.75, water-for-health.co.uk). “It supplies a truly significant volume of beneficial bacteria,” she says. “Every sachet contains one trillion CFU from human-derived isolates, meaning that the bacteria is uniquely isolated from humans, not cows or soil as with other supplements. It stands to reason that native strains will colonise far better than those isolated from other sources.”

“Choosing a probiotic supplement that is easy to take and contains the ‘right’ levels of ‘good bacteria’ can be tricky”

Find out how you can train your brain to achieve optimum mental wellbeing, in our new wellbeing column on page 58.

Less-Stress London brings you the latest information and top tips on how to de-stress in the city

53

health

2

1

3

4

TOP 5

HEALTHY SNACKS 1 Hazelnut-butter-topped oatcakes drizzled with Hive & Keeper (hiveandkeeper. com). This is a balanced combination of protein, slow-release carbohydrates and honey – a good prebiotic.

2 Bol Foods’ Japanese Salad Jar (bolfoods.com) is a colourful, nutrientdense powerhouse that provides two of your minimum five a day. Based at Westbourne Studios, Bol Foods’ motto is “Eat plants love life”.

3 Batch Organics’ Blueberry and Almond Butter Breakfast Bowl (batchorganics.com). This Workspace customer at Exmouth House has come up with the ultimate grab-n-go breakfast: antioxidant-rich blueberries combined with heart-health-promoting oats and protein-rich almond butter.

4 Gato & Co’s Chocolate & Aubergine Fondant (gatoandco.com). Enjoy this indulgent but healthy sweet treat made with gooey aubergine, spirulina, cacao and a touch of honey.

5 54

5 Nix and Kix’s Mango and Ginger (nixandkix.com) Bored of plain water?

This Southbank House-based Workspace company has the answer. Try a refreshing concoction of sparkling water, vitamin C-packed mango, cayenne pepper and digestion-aiding ginger.

homeworkmagazine

MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR MEETINGS “Great space, brilliant service and we won a substantial piece of business there and then, the client was really impressed, all worked seamlessly.”

John Graham, adcreative

Instant Access, Anywhere We pride ourselves on our huge range of high-spec meeting rooms across London. You can book any of these by the hour and you don’t even need to be a customer to do so.

Tech City

Battleship, Fleet Street, Blackfriars

Our rooms are kitted out with the latest technology, including business grade Wi-Fi, 44˝ LED screens as a minimum and many have ClickShare, a wireless presentation tool.

Stay Fuelled We’ve got award winning cafés and restaurants on-site, to keep you and your team fully functional.

Jim, Grand Union Studios, Ladbroke Grove

We’ve teamed up with Excell to offer technical support on speed dial for all meeting room bookings

There are over 75 meeting rooms featured on our site for you to browse and book instantly, visit

workspace.co.uk/meeting-rooms

Workspace Book Corner We asked five customers which science books inspired them and helped them to find success in business.

Here are their top recommendations

Gavin Heavyside CTO at MyDrive, The Leather Market “When I look back, a book that still stands out is A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, which I read in my early teens.

It opened my eyes to the quantum world in a very accessible way, especially the bizarre yet fascinating behaviours at subatomic scale that can’t be explained by classical physics, but govern the behaviour of things we use every day.

The underlying laws of the real world can be as strange and inexplicable as science fiction to those who haven’t studied physics.”

Was there a beginning of time?

Could time run backwards?

Is the universe infinite or does it have boundaries? These are just some of the questions considered in an internationally acclaimed masterpiece by one of the world’s greatest thinkers.

It begins by reviewing the great theories of the cosmos from Newton to Einstein, before delving into the secrets that still lie at the heart of space and time, from the Big Bang to black holes, via spiral galaxies and string theory. To this day, A Brief History of Time remains a staple of the scientific canon, and its succinct and clear language continues to introduce millions to the universe and its wonders.

homeworkmagazine

business books

Heather Andrew CEO at Neuro-Insight, Metal Box Factory “It talks about how emotions guide behaviour and decision-making, and was one of the first things that got me interested in the benefits of looking at subconscious rather than claimed behaviour in understanding people’s motivations and behaviour.”

In the centuries since Descartes famously proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am”, science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being.

Even modern neuroscience has tended until recently to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error. Antonio Damasio challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wonderfully engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behaviour.

Wyndham Richardson

Charlotte Spokes

MD and Co-founder at Pulselive, Kennington Park

Founder at My Friend Charlie, The Print Rooms

“It speaks to the fact that increasingly people are spending their lives glued to a screen. Technology’s brilliant, but we need breaks from it to think about life. It’s about knowing when to switch off.

I attempt to live by it.”

“I read it when I was studying osteopathy and it significantly changed my opinion of clinical trials and their relevance.

Covering topics from faddy health trends (‘clean eating’ springs to mind currently) to worrying statistics surrounding medical trials, Goldacre pulls apart the information we receive via the media, so-called ‘experts’ and pharmaceutical companies, and shows the importance of critical thinking rather than believing everything we see, read or hear.”

Powers argues that we need a new philosophy for life with screens.

To find it, he reaches into the past, uncovering a rich trove of ideas that have helped people manage and enjoy their connected lives for thousands of years. Drawing on some of history’s most brilliant thinkers, from Plato to Shakespeare to Thoreau, he shows that digital connectedness serves us best when it’s balanced by its opposite, disconnectedness. Using his own life as both laboratory and object lesson, Powers demonstrates why this is the moment to revisit our relationship with screens and mobile technologies, and how profound the rewards of doing so can be. Lively, original and entertaining, Hamlet’s BlackBerry will challenge you to rethink your digital life.

“Hamlet’s BlackBerry will challenge you to rethink your digital life” workspacegroup.co.uk

Since 2003, Dr Ben Goldacre has been exposing dodgy medical data in his popular Guardian column. In this book he takes on the MMR hoax and misleading cosmetics ads, vitamins and mankind’s vexed relationship with all manner of “toxins”. The selfconfessed “Johnny Ball cum Witchfinder General” performs a successful detox on a Barbie doll, sees his dead cat become a certified nutritionist and probes the supposed medical qualifications of “Dr” Gillian McKeith. Full of spleen and satire, Goldacre takes us on a hilarious, invigorating and ultimately alarming journey through the bad science we are fed daily by hacks and quacks.

Adrian Hon CEO and Co-founder at Six to Start, Spectrum House “Despite being 12 years old, this book still has one of the best depictions of the future that I’ve ever read. It doesn’t have a great plot but the descriptions of social media, technology and gaming are just fantastic.”

Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer’s patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world-renowned poet; now he is 75 years old – although by a medical miracle he looks much younger – and he’s starting over, unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son’s family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age, although the new world is available only if, like his teenage granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access (through nodes designed into smart clothes) and to see the digital context through smart contact lenses. However, when Gu begins to retrain at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination.

57

wellbeing

“We help clients remember what normal feels like�

Find your inner peace

James Roy, Technical Director at Brainworks

58

homeworkmagazine

the power of

Welcome to our new regular column on wellbeing, bringing you the latest information on how to maintain a healthy work-life balance

By James Langton, Editor at Less-Stress London When did you last breeze through the day, managing stressful situations and difficult people like a seasoned plate spinner? Most of us have a fairly decent hit rate, but can the science of wellbeing help us surf rather than swim tirelessly toward our goal horizons?

Many who train for marathons find they can train their brain as well as their body to achieve peak performance.

Brainworks is London’s leading neurofeedback and brain-training clinic.

Technical Director James Roy says, “Professionals either come to us because they are locked into the classic stress symptoms of sleeplessness, anxiety and subsequent loss of concentration, or because they want to train their mind to consistently perform at peak.”

The starting point is a rigorous assessment and a brain-mapping session. The Brainworks team then use sensors and video imagery to devise a bespoke programme that retrains the neurotransmitters towards a calmer response to stressful situations.

Roy says, “We help clients remember what normal feels like – a calm baseline to work from. We can then train them to improve focus and concentration, helping to achieve enhanced performance and productivity.”

A state of mental wellbeing allows for a calm mind – the best starting point for positive decision-making in terms of lifestyle and health choices – and the links between a calm mind and enhanced cognition are well researched. Wouldn’t it be great to have a meditation studio where you could drop in and calm the mind?

Inhere Meditation offers just such a haven, based at The Light Centre by

workspacegroup.co.uk

Monument. It offers seven different focus sessions, depending on the state of mind you’d like to achieve, and you can meditate for anywhere from five to 40 minutes.

If you are a regular meditator ready to deepen your practice, consider the benefits of flotation therapy. This works on the principle of restricted environmental stimulation to achieve a sensation of weightlessness, by floating in a warm, dimly lit bath or pod of Epsom salts. This is the perfect environment in which to temporarily let go of the body and luxuriate in the power of the mind.

Finally, nutrition is a key factor to consider if you’re serious about achieving optimum performance. Food for the Brain is a charity dedicated to studying the link between what we eat and how we think. It is behind The Brain Bio Centre in Putney, which tests for biochemical or physiological imbalances that can affect mood and wellbeing. Specialists at the centre can then devise a personal nutritional roadmap.

We’re all different; one person’s stress is another’s drive for success, so it’s important to do your research to find out what could offer the best solution for your particular situation and lifestyle. Personal recommendations and reviews are useful, but ultimately, trying something yourself is usually the best way to judge if a treatment, therapy or fitness path is right for you. ww Less-Stress London is a directory of health and wellbeing services for Londoners. It provides information about the mind and body and where to grab a good, healthy lunch. Browse less-stress.london for upcoming events and a carefully curated collection of professional bodies, wellbeing clinics, therapists and practitioners

Unwind at Inhere Meditation

BRAIN TRAINING

Take a minute Explore these options to see how they could help you clear the mental fog JUST BREATHE LONDON Social meditation groups justbreatheproject.com FLOATWORKS Flotation therapy centre floatworks.com THE SLEEP SCHOOL Drug-free insomnia workshops and clinics thesleepschool.org BIOLAB Nutritional and environmental science lab based at The Light Box biolab.co.uk BRITISH ASSOCIATION OF ANGER MANAGEMENT (BAAM) angermanage.co.uk

Find out how tapping into the inner workings of the brain can help you hire the right people and improve your customer offering in our feature on page 34

59

mobile gaming

on game

Mobile phone games, are they good or bad for us? Supporters and sceptics are locked in a fierce debate, but whether you like them or loathe them, they are hugely popular. Editor Farah Khalique uncovers the science behind gaming and meets the developers who are crafting the cutting-edge games that we’ll be playing tomorrow We love playing games on our phones – on the tube to work; waiting at the doctor’s surgery; in line at the supermarket; even (for some people) on the loo. We simply can’t get enough of them, as proved by figures published by gaming-intelligence provider, SuperData. Last year games generated almost $60 billion in revenues – a third more than in 2016 – and come 2020, mobile phone games will make up more than half the total games market. Our days of patiently playing quaint games like Echo the Dolphin on a home console are well and truly over.

Mobile mania

What is it that makes us find mobile phone games so exhilarating? The answer can be found in the deepest recesses of our minds, says Dr Zaheer Hussain, a psychologist at University of Derby who specialises in technology use, social media and behavioural addictions. A member of the

60

International Gaming Research Unit, he describes how mobile phone games spark up the pleasure system of the brain, releasing the feel-good chemical dopamine.

From the moment a player presses on a game app, they are introduced to a plethora of visual and auditory stimuli, like brightly coloured sweets in Candy Crush or squawking eagles in Angry Birds.

Hussain says, “When you play such a game and hear a sound, that is the stimulus and you respond to it. To begin with, you get a reward for your actions, but as the game gets more difficult, there is an extended time period between the stimulus and the response of the feedback loop. You still get that dopamine hit, but the time between your behaviour and the reward increases as a way of trying to lure you in, and keep you attracted to the game.”

The secret to success lies in making the game as fun and addictive as possible,

says Jack Tang, Founder of Funky Panda Games, a mobile gaming start-up based at Workspace’s Kennington Park. It won early success with its first dark fantasy game, Monster Mountain, which was awarded Best Role-Playing Game at the TIGA Games Industry Awards in 2016. Now the team is working on a sequel, as well as new games Stardust Battle and Tap Jumpers.

Tang says, “I think what is behind [the rise of] mobile games is that people want to kill time. So it has to be fun, and you have to create enough fun for a short amount of time. If a player only has limited amount of time – maybe they are on the bus – they want to play for five or 10 minutes, so each game play has to be short enough so they can finish.”

Smartphone addiction

There is no denying the popularity of mobile games, with the likes of battle game Clash

homeworkmagazine

Discover Monster Mountain, an enchanting world of dark fantasy

“Mobile phone games spark up the ‘pleasure system’ of the brain”

Royale able to rake in more than a billion dollars last year. However, mobile phones and gaming have also attracted criticism.

Two of Apple’s biggest investors voiced their growing concern about smartphone addiction in an open letter, and the World Health Organization (WHO) will list gaming addiction as a mental-health condition in 2018. Are these games actually bad for us?

WHO characterises gaming addiction as “a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour”, which includes diminishing control over how much time is spent playing games, prioritising it above other important things and being unable to stop playing even when it has bad consequences.

Research has shown that staring at screens close up for too long is bad for our eyes. A study from King’s College London found that rising rates of short-sightedness are not down to natural ageing, but rather too much time spent staring at screens and not enough time in natural daylight. Severe myopia is linked to serious eye conditions

workspacegroup.co.uk

like glaucoma and retinal detachment.

The authors called for more research on the impact of the rapid rise in computers, tablets and mobile phones on visual development in children.

So should we tear ourselves away from our screens? The answer is not clearcut. Supporters point to scientific studies of gamers that show enhanced activity in the brain stem – to be exact, in the inferior parietal lobule, left posterior cerebellum and the left middle frontal gyrus. These three areas of the brain are related to our sensory motor co-ordination.

Hussain says, “These areas light up in gamers; one of the positive aspects of these activities is that it can improve your hand-eye co-ordination in problem-solving activities. Also, some people find that games can help them improve their memory. They may know where certain items are in a game such as a fantasy game, so they know where to go next time when they fail.”

Mobile games will also often have forums attached to them, where players can

Above: A character from Stardust Battle, a new game coming from Funky Panda Games Below: Buzz Lightyear, to the rescue!

Left: AR bringing a book to life, The Boy with His Head Stuck in a Book Below left: The Zappar crew at Barley Mow Business Centre Below: Funky Panda Games designs a character for its new game, Stardust Battle

“A pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour”

WHO definition of gaming addiction

chat and exchange knowledge, helping each other to complete levels. This online social interaction allows people to find and nurture a community with fellow gamers.

Make education fun

Progressive developers are adopting cutting-edge technology like augmented reality (AR) to make learning a more fun experience for children, bringing an element of gaming to education. Workspace customer Zappar, based at Barley Mow in Chiswick, is a pioneer in this field. Zappar creates augmented-reality experiences for businesses including Shazam and BMW, as well as schools and colleges.

Partnerships and Marketing Director, Max Dawes, says, “Augmented reality and education go hand in hand. AR not only

62

fosters learning in children, it also engages the mind differently to normal teaching methodology. Learning by doing is a key factor here that AR facilitates.”

Zappar’s lead designer, Anna Broadhurst, recently created a book called The Boy with His Head Stuck in a Book, for children who are not engaged with reading but love technology like mobile phones.

Dawes says, “The digital content within the pages adds an additional layer to the story itself, merging physical content with digital interactivity. It’s that wow moment in boardrooms, classrooms, events or conferences when users see images come to life, words jump off a page, or a 3D object or character come to life in front of their eyes.”

Mobile-phone gaming may be causing alarm in some circles, but in fact it is just

one element of an ever-changing world.

Augmented-reality, virtual-reality and mixed-reality devices are the newest frontier in gaming.

Tang at Funky Panda Games says, “They will not replace mobile phones because people still want to make calls and there are battery limitations right now, but soon we should see augmented-reality and virtual-reality devices as an extension of the phone. This is the next big thing for all game makers.” ww What do you think about mobile gaming? Whip out your mobile and share your thoughts on Twitter, using #homeworkmag – and remember to tag @WorkspaceGroup

homeworkmagazine

Below (from top): Fight to the death on award-winning game, Monster Mountain; Stardust Battle, a new game from Funky Panda Games; listen to your elders on Monster Mountain

Try your hand at being a graffiti artist with My Friend Charlie

The science of love Is there a scientific formula for love?

Online matchmaker eHarmony claims there is – and has built an entire business around it. The Advertising Standards Authority, however, ruled not when it banned eHarmony’s London Underground billboard ad: “Step aside, fate. It’s time science had a go at love.”

The company defended its “compatibilitymatching algorithm” that matches users on its website, but fate won the day.

Online and mobile dating services like eHarmony dominate the search for love, but the gamification of popular dating apps like Tinder has attracted criticism that it makes it harder to find true love.

Tinder Co-founder Sean Rad has admitted that he created it as a more of a game than a genuine dating app.

Club Workspace customer My Friend Charlie takes an old-school approach to

dating – and it’s working. The offline dating platform, run by Charlie Spokes at The Print Rooms, puts on paid dating events for Londoners in their 30s and 40s – everything from wine tasting to axe throwing and graffiti tours.

Charlie says, “A lot of dating apps focus on superficial transactional relationships. With My Friend Charlie, you meet someone you’ve already got something in common with – it’s a more meaningful match. Plus it’s not like a date with one person; you go out with a group of like-minded people.”

Charlie says that about 70% of events result in people going on at least a first date, and she is expanding the number of monthly events to meet growing demand.

They say you can’t buy love, but you can buy a fun night out and leave the rest up to fate.

“A lot of dating apps focus on superficial transactional relationships” Charlotte Spokes, Director at My Friend Charlie workspacegroup.co.uk

63

the workspace advantage

What does The Workspace Advantage mean for you? We asked some of our customers and this is what they had to say...

At Workspace, we believe that every business should be given the opportunity to thrive. This is why our business centres are home to some of the most inspiring startups, entrepreneurs, growing and established businesses in the capital.

The Workspace Advantage helps to give them the edge We don’t see ourselves as simply a business centre provider; we create buzzing communities with super-fast technologies at their core. The Workspace Advantage stands for exactly this. It shines a light on what makes our spaces more than just four walls, and enables our customers to perform at their very best.

The Workspace Advantage has three core features: #WiredDifferently helps set us apart from the rest. As well as super-fast 10Gbps broadband and buildingwide Wi-Fi, we aim to create spaces that inspire and promote positive energy.

Workspace’s award-winning connectivity enables our unique customers to think and move fast. #SuperConnected means that we encourage our customers to connect and collaborate with a raft of equally innovative, ambitious businesses. Communal breakout areas and networking events foster a sense of community, helping you to build connections and working relationships.

64

#NoLimits #NoLimits is our belief that you should be given every opportunity to reach your true potential, so we don’t put limits on the type or flexibility of the space you need.

platform, based at The Record Hall (see page 53). “The best bit is definitely its proximity to Leather Lane, though... the food choices are amazing!”

We always want to hear your success stories and find out how we’re helping to make this happen. This is why we’ve asked some of our customers what The Workspace Advantage means to them.

Igloo Vision

Tom Putnam BeeLine

“The Biscuit Factory is spot on for us,” says Tom Putnam, Co-founder at BeeLine. “It’s a space we can put our mark on and make our own, but without having to worry about the boring things like maintenance, utilities and such.”

The brains behind smart handlebarmounted devices, BeeLine makes getting from A to B on your bike that bit easier (see page 46). And as business picks up pace, Putnam looks to the future. “It’s great to be surrounded by so many other energetic young companies and good to know that as we grow, we’ll be able to move to a bigger space within The Biscuit Factory.”

Elsie Rutterford Clean Beauty Co

“We love the Workspace environment.

It’s a hugely collaborative working space and feels like a mini community, but with the advantage of having our own dedicated space and studio,” says Elsie Rutterford, Co-founder at the UK’s leading beauty

Jessica Cooper Igloo Vision, based at Parma House in Wood Green, is a world leader in 360 degree and VR immersive projection systems (see page 32). Its large installations accommodate anything from five to 750 people. “We need a big flexible space to design and develop new tech that keeps us ahead of the curve, and Workspace allows us to do just this,” says Business Development Executive Jessica Cooper.

“We’ve been able to grow and establish our London presence,” explains Cooper.

“And with its great links to London, we can host demos for people from all over the city. The renovation of The Chocolate Factory’s café next door also makes for a great spot to take clients for lunch and have internal meetings.” ww Are you eager to be part of a buzzing community? Here at Workspace we pride ourselves on bringing people together. Our dynamic and stimulating workspaces provide the perfect networking opportunities and space for businesses to flourish.

Find out more about what Workspace can offer by visiting workspace.co.uk/advantage

homeworkmagazine

Clockwise from top: Jessica Cooper, Tom Putnam, Elsie Rutterford

“ We love the Workspace environment.

It’s a hugely collaborative working space and feels like a mini community”

Elsie Rutterford, Co-founder at Clean Beauty Co

my workspace

Dr Luke Montuori Central Test Dr Luke Montuori is a psychometrician with a PhD in psychology at Central Test, based in Kennington Park. Central Test offers innovative personality tests and state-of-the-art training to organisations looking to understand their employees on a deeper level. We asked Dr Montuori about what drew him to the field of psychometrics, his favourite places in London to let his hair down and his go-to lunch spot near Kennington Park Favourite scientist?

I’d be betraying my academic roots if I didn’t say B.F. Skinner [American psychologist, behaviourist, author, inventor and social philosopher].

What does a psychometrician do?

Psychometricians created the personality test you had to do as part of your job application, they monitor the tests used in schools and universities to make sure questions are fair, relevant and informative, and devise new ways of measuring the human experience.

What do you love about your work?

I get bored doing the same thing over and over, but this work is incredibly varied.

How do you get into work?

I’m one of the lucky ones – I get to walk into work every morning. And no, I’m not sorry.

Office view you’d kill to have?

An unimpeded view of the Shard – it’d be hard to top that.

Go-to lunch spot near Kennington Park?

The Fentiman Arms. I’m a big fan of a Friday pub lunch, especially in summer.

What’s your favourite thing about Kennington Park?

I find the building to be really visually appealing, and it’s nice to work in an environment like that. I also think there’s always a bit of a buzz, with lots of people working in really interesting companies, so it’s just a great atmosphere to come into every day. Café Mimosa’s parties are pretty good too.

Best place to let your hair down in London?

Southbank – there’s always something interesting going on, lots of good food, and it has my favourite views of London. I love to hang out there.

Where do you tend to chill/brainstorm in Kennington?

I find The Park [a lounge area on the first floor] to be the best place to have informal meetings outside of the office, but apparently I’m not the only one. Sometimes you’re lucky to get a seat there!

What skill would you like to master?

Making better jokes.

Worst work habit?

Opening more browser tabs than either I or my computer can handle.

If you could turn any activity into an Olympic sport, in which field what would you have a good chance at winning a medal?

Making bad jokes.

Favourite place to work out?

Camberwell swimming pool. Its architecture and big windowed ceiling make my swims that much more enjoyable. Either that, or the new ultra-modern pool at The Castle Centre [in Elephant & Castle].

How do you relax after a hard day at work?

I love to cook, but often it’s hard to find the time after work.

Favourite app?

The Headspace mindfulness app. I find it really useful to get myself in the right mindset for work in the morning, or for winding down in the evening.

Home is...

Sydney.

Read more about how Luke uses psychometric testing to help clients on page 45

“We devise new ways of measuring the human experience” 66

homeworkmagazine

a d k …

… a table that works really hard. So we called ours, ‘Worktable’.

Rawside Furniture is a London-based, designer, builder and lover of the most practical office furniture on planet Earth. www.rawside.co ~ hello@rawside.co ~

@rawside

Rawside, The Undercroft, Kennington Park, 1-3 Brixton Road, London, SW9 6DE

“ Use it or lose it. The brain is in some ways a muscle. If you use it a lot, you will build up those skills�

Dr Luke Montuori, Central Test

spring/summer 2018

Welcome to the Machine Can AI live up to the hype?

CONNECT WITH US Follow us online for the latest news, events and behind the scenes shots from the Workspace team.

Follow

Blog

Pin

Search: Workspace Group / Club Workspace If your company has great news to share, let us know – we’d love to shout about it!

Drop us a line at social@workspace.co.uk

Share

contributions by

+

The science of business Every business dreams of capturing the hearts and minds of its customers, but what is it that makes certain brands able to command millions of lifelong paying customers? From Coca-Cola to Ikea, some companies seem to have that “special sauce”. In our fifth issue of homeWORK magazine, we draw inspiration from science to find out how this discipline can help you better understand your customers, your employees – and yourself.

Smart businesses are delving deep into the world of neuroscience and psychometrics to figure out what makes customers and employees tick; cognitive scientist turned writer Stav Dimitropoulos explores this fascinating topic in our lead feature on page 34. Dr Luke Montuori from Central Test in Kennington Park, explains how advanced psychometric testing works, and shares his top tips on brain training. You can find out more about what makes the doctor tick in My Workspace on page 66, and more about brain training in our new wellbeing column on page 58.

Science is also shaking up how businesses can market to customers. Workspace customer Lumen Research on page 30 is helping to bring scientific testing like eye-tracking out of the lab and onto our mobile phones and laptops, at a fraction of the price. The beauty of scientific methods like eye-tracking is that it reveals the truth. As one of the greatest scientists, Isaac Newton, once said, “Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend but my greatest friend is truth.”

I believe that one of the biggest themes in business right now is our increasing ability to uncover and share the truth.

For years, opacity has been the friend of the middleman, to the detriment of those with true creative vision and, ultimately, the unaware customer. But we know that customers are savvier than ever, thanks to the internet and growing communication channels like social media.

The emergence of blockchain technology can bring greater transparency to how we do business by shining a spotlight on supply chains. Read how new advertising agency Truth is putting blockchain at its core to show advertisers exactly how their money is spent, and find out how blockchain could revolutionise the way you do business on page 12.

Alongside the rise of technologies like blockchain is artificial intelligence.

Fervent advocates believe that AI will allow us to ditch monotonous tasks and set free our true creativity; others worry that it could unleash untold horrors. We spoke to the Workspace customers at the cutting edge of AI innovation on page 20 – their views may surprise you.

This is our most ambitious issue yet of homeWORK magazine; we hope that the content inspires you and gives you food for thought.

contribute We would love to hear what you think of the magazine and of any exciting news to feature in the next issue, so why not tweet us @WorkspaceGroup using the #homeworkmag hashtag?

farah Farah Khalique, Editor @FarahKhalique

Arthur House Arthur is a freelance journalist whose writing on arts and culture appears in The Spectator, The Economist’s 1843 magazine and international art publication, Apollo.

He previously worked at The Telegraph and The Calvert Journal

Stav Dimitropoulos Stav is an international journalist who writes for titles including Science Magazine, Vice and Nieman Journalism Lab. As a fledgling cognitive scientist who veered down the journalism path, she specialises in neuroscience and has written about religiouscum-spiritual experiences for Discover, as well as a viral Medium series on the topic

Mitra Wicks Mitra is Editor in Chief of London’s online luxury lifestyle magazine, 7 Star Life, and has previously written articles for Mixmag, The Ecologist and Yoga Magazine. She regularly writes features about holistic health, food, beauty and travel. Read her work at 7starlife. co.uk and find her on Instagram @mitrawicks

Ed Owen Ed is a freelance journalist who specialises in marketing and advertising. He has written for a variety of publications including The Guardian and The Drum in London, Amsterdam and Brussels over the past 20 years. He is Head of Content at The Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing

Fleur Macdonald Fleur is a freelance journalist who has contributed to the Economist’s 1843 magazine, the BBC and TRUE Africa. Find her on Twitter @fleur_macdonald

This issue is dedicated to world-renowned English physicist Stephen Hawking, who died aged 76 on 14th March. A theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author, Hawking made groundbreaking theories on black holes and relativity. Read more about his inspiring book, A Brief History of Time, in the Workspace Book Corner on page 56.

A colour rendering of brain neurons under a microscope

#5 spring/summer 2018

contents

12

How Blockchain could shake up your Business The digital scaffolding behind Bitcoin is radically changing the business world

HomeWork, issue #5, Spring/Summer 2018, Editor/ Features Writer Farah Khalique, Art Director Dom Salmon, Writer Arthur House, Editorial Assistant Camilla Allen, original photography Dom Salmon, Neil Massey, cover image ‘Stardust’ by Nicholas Gentry, Subeditor Vanessa Harriss, Publisher/Advertising Dan Reeves, dan@true212.com.

HomeWork is published by TRUE 212; true212.com.

The magazine is printed by Alban House Print, 105 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BU. At the time of print every effort was made to ensure the information contained in the magazine was correct.

Special thanks to: Rich Walker, Managing Director at Shadow Robot Company, Zheng Lin, CEO at Intelligent Robots Ltd, Rory McElearney, Conversational Interfaces Lead at Filament, Jacob Tomlinson, Lead Engineer at the Met Office, Pippa Campbell, Nutritional Therapist, Hala El-Shafie, Founder at Nutrition Rocks, Cassandra Burns, Nutritional Therapist, Leanne Spencer, Founder at Bodyshot Performance, Justin Rogers, Creative Director at Ten Health & Fitness, Dominika Minarovic, Co-Founder at Clean Beauty Co, Mel Turkerman, Founder at DermaNutri, Amy Morris, Naturopathic Nutritionist, Dr Zaheer Hussain, Psychologist, Jack Tang, Founder at Funky Panda Games, Max Dawes, Partnership and Marketing Director at Zappar, Charlotte Spokes, Founder at My Friend Charlie, Tom Putnam, Co-founder at BeeLine, Elsie Rutterford, Co-founder at Clean Beauty Co, Jessica Cooper, Business Development Executive at Igloo Vision, Dr Luke Montuori, Psychometrician at Central Test, Adrian Hon, CEO at Six to Start, Wyndham Richardson, Managing Director at Pulselive, Cormac Bourne, General Manager UK at STATS, James Roy, Technical Director at Brainworks, Adam Hopkinson, Founder at Truth, Jonny Goldstone, Co-founder at Green Tomato Cars, Robert Styles, Business Development Manager at Norvento Enerxia, Karen Jamison, Energy and Sustainability Manager at Workspace, Anna Norman, General Manager at Camara Learning, Michalis Michael, CEO at DigitalMR, Gavin Heavyside, CTO at MyDrive, Doug Ayres, Managing Director at Filament, Ben Gancz, Director at Qumodo, Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University in St Louis, David Hall, Executive Director at Behaviour Change, Sabina Socias, UK Branch Manager at Central Test, Heather Andrew, CEO of Neuro-Insight, Joseph Devlin, Head of Experimental Psychology at University College London, Mike Follett, Managing Director at Lumen Research, Peter Halliday, Head of Communications at Igloo Vision, Phil Watton, Managing Director at Lodestar, Seán Cotter, Head of Marketing at The Chat Shop

16

Green Light for Growth Find out how Workspace and its customers are making renewable energy mainstream

20

Welcome to the Machine Workspace customers at the forefront of AI innovation explain how it works and explore its potential

+

30 The Marketing Maestros Science has revolutionised the art of selling

50 Shape up with Science Forget the fads and focus on the scientific facts to radiate health

58 The Power of Brain Training Ditch bad habits and retrain your brain’s neurotransmitters, in our new regular column on wellbeing

60 Game On Discover how our brain lights up when we play mobile games, and the cutting-edge games of tomorrow

34

The Neural Network How can our growing understanding of the human mind help us in business? Neuroscience experts walk us through this intriguing debate

the big picture

An artist’s impression of a machine-learning algorithm recreating a neural network

06

homeworkmagazine

“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted”

Alan Turing

Computing, Machinery and Intelligence (1950) Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (1912–1954) was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist

workspacegroup.co.uk

07

news

Working knowledge We all know Workspace is full of fantastic businesses – you bump into each other in the lift, buying your morning coffee or on the way to a meeting room – but imagine if you could connect with brands not just in your building but in all Workspace buildings across London.

You’re in luck! Enter WorkspacePerks, an online platform that will allow you to promote your business to the Workspace community and, crucially, give you access to giveaways, offers and discounts from other Workspace businesses. “It’s a free advertising platform that encourages our customers to trade with each other,” says Workspace’s Corporate Development Manager, Stefan Duda. “We’ve got a huge number of really exciting businesses within our portfolio and we want to give them a way to promote their brands to their neighbours.”

Launching with discounts on food- and flower-delivery services, gym memberships and huge savings on stylish office furniture (among others), look out for WorkspacePerks, coming soon to workspace.co.uk

Above: London’s first wonky-fruit-andveg delivery company, Oddbox, is on the WorkspacePerks platform Right: The Volcano Coffee Works café at Parkhall Business Centre

Combat climate change with Your Energy

As part of Workspace’s commitment to reducing its impact on the environment and do the right thing, we’re pleased to announce that our online Energy Dashboard: Your Energy is coming soon. You will be able to log in and monitor your energy consumption in order to reduce your usage and cut back on costs. The portal will allow you to view your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly energy profile, and we will only bill you for the energy you actually use.

Get your groove on with the party bus

Do you want to throw a party like no other? Gaming Party Bus has launched its state-of-theart new vehicle, offering a gaming-party experience for both novices and experienced gamers at corporate events and special occasions. Based at Q West in Brentford, Gaming Party Bus’s newest addition comes fully loaded with the latest consoles, motion race simulators and VR headsets, all adding to the unique on-the-road gaming experience.

“Bringing the fun to your next event has never been simpler,” says Managing Director Edwin Chiamonwu. “We pride ourselves on providing a truly unforgettable experience for all our clients, providing a party not to be missed!”

To find out more or book a vehicle, head to gamingpartybus.co.uk

10

homeworkmagazine

Have you had your Weetabix?

Based in Clerkenwell Workshops, market researcher Trinity McQueen has teamed up with Weetabix to develop groundbreaking new insights into how people buy breakfast cereal, helping the company clinch the Market Research Society’s industry award for Applications of Research. Trinity McQueen’s research helped simplify Weetabix’s in-store strategy and tactics by cutting back on packaging, product codes and competing promotions.

Get to grips with GDPR

New Workspace centre: Fuel Tank in Deptford

We’re very excited to be welcoming Fuel Tank to our growing portfolio of properties. Just a short walk from Greenwich, this former carburettor factory in Deptford has undergone a complete makeover and now offers ultra-modern office space, flooded with light. With 63 offices and studios, a high-spec bookable meeting room called Diesel, an on-site café serving a range of snacks and lunches, and great transport links, the space is as functional as it is stylish.

Book a viewing now, or take the virtual tour at workspace.co.uk/workspaces/fuel-tank

Spring water craze hots up The latest wacky trend taking over Silicon Valley is untreated, unfiltered raw spring water, which sells for up to $6 a gallon. One thing is for sure, the craze for spring water is alive and kicking.

Business is booming for Workspace customer, Rejuvenation Water, based at Havelock Terrace in Battersea. It sells amino acid-enriched drinks made from Staffordshire spring water, which also contain five grams of plant-based protein per bottle. It recently launched Ginger & Lime and Spanish Orange flavours in Holland & Barrett, and is also available in Costco, following a successful 10-week roadshow. It is now eyeing up Ocado.

Check out rejuvenationwater.co.uk for more flavours

Connectivity: going for gold We’re on a mission to provide you with first-rate connectivity throughout all our buildings. Twelve of our centres have now hit either gold or platinum standard for Wired Certification from WiredScore.

Launched by the Mayor of London in 2015, the connectivity-accreditation scheme rates buildings on their level of cutting-edge digital infrastructure and ability to offer world-class, secure and reliable connectivity.

The Metal Box Factory in Southwark was the first to be awarded platinum rating, the top Wired Certification, and now we’re setting sights high and going for gold (and

workspacegroup.co.uk

beyond) across all of our on-net sites.

Workspace’s Head of Client Connected Services, Chris Boultwood, said, “The building infrastructure is fundamental in us being able to provide a resilient and secure service to our customers. And we are reviewing every building in our on-net portfolio with an ambition to instill a baseline of Wired Certified Gold.

“WiredScore is now embedded into the development process of our buildings from day one,” he adds. “As soon as we hear that we’ve got a project coming out of the ground, the WiredScore process starts then.”

Sweeping new laws on data come into force from May, affecting businesses large and small. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) places tighter controls on the way businesses use data, because of routine misuse of personal information, leading to the development of “the right to be forgotten”. Importantly, the laws will stay on the rulebooks even as the UK government navigates its way out of the European Union, in order to keep open its trade in data with Europe.

Read our Q&A list to make sure you are up to speed.

When does GDPR come into effect?

25th May 2018.

Who does this apply to?

Any business that holds personal information on EU citizens.

What counts as personal data?

It’s pretty broad: any info that relates to a person, such as a name, or even something as innocuous as a mobile device ID. What questions should every business ask itself?

How was the data my business uses collected? How is it manipulated? Where is it stored? Do I need to retain it?

What are the penalties for non-compliance?

If you’re lucky, a warning. If not, fines could reach as much as €20 million or 4% of global turnover, whichever is higher.

Where can I find more information?

Try the Information Commissioners Office at ico.org.uk or the Direct Marketing Association at dma.org.uk/gdpr

09

news

Club Managers Raissa Uwineza, Shanice Buckley and Tom Henry at the newly rebranded Club Workspace Clerkenwell Workshops

Club news

Club Workspace unveils a sleek new look Seven years on from its initial launch in 2011, Club Workspace – one of the pioneers of co-working in London – recently underwent a complete renovation. “We felt it was time to give it a fresh identity,” says Marketing Manager Charlotte Bellamy. “We wanted to modernise the Club Workspace brand to reflect the fast-paced, disruptive businesses using our spaces, and we set out to achieve this with a brand new logo, revised membership options and a new website.”

With its fast-growing network of eclectic businesses across 19 locations, Club has been given a fresh look designed to reflect its professional and successful customer base. Club has brought in a range of new membership options specifically aimed at small businesses, start-ups, freelancers and larger corporates looking for additional space. This includes a new Day Pass, enabling flexible workers to drop into any Club location 9am–5pm, Monday–Friday.

In addition, Club’s new Hangout membership allows more frequent city-dwellers to use a selection of 10 of its co-working environments, five days a week. And, with each package catering to a different individual’s needs, workers can also opt for a private desk package or an unlimited co-working membership across any Club Workspace site, London-wide.

Nikki Saunders, Creative Director at branding agency Haime & Butler, took the reins on refashioning Club’s brand image. “Our brief was to create an identity to reflect the Club Workspace brand offering of creative, co-working space,” says Saunders. “The team used a cooler, refined colour palette of black and white, and mix of typefaces – one classically modern and the other a nod to the corporate font of Workspace.”

“We’ve designed an identity that better reflects the Club brand ethos, Club members and the interiors of the Clubs themselves,” she says.

“We’ve designed an identity that better reflects the Club brand ethos”

Supermodel’s charity app wins new fans

Hats off to donations app Elbi, which has been crowned App of the Day by Apple, giving it a major boost. Created

by Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova and PR professional Timon Afinsky, and based at Fleet Street’s Club Workspace, Elbi aims to bridge social media and humanitarianism. The app effectively turns “likes” into money for a good cause and offers LoveCoin rewards for donations, making helping others easy and fun. Users scroll through charity projects listed on the app and hit the “Love” button on the ones they like, similar to an Instagram or Twitter feed, which sends their donations to charities. This earns them free LoveCoins to spend in Elbi’s online fashion shop, which sells high-fashion items like Fendi earphones and fine jewellery from Messika.

The success of the app in the US meant charitable giving rocketed. All charities featured by Elbi exceeded funding goals: the Diabetes Research Institute raised 20 times (2,691 Loves) its campaign target. “With Elbi you can do small actions that make a big difference,” says Vodianova. “That is what Elbi stands for.”

Visit elbi.com to find out more, or download the app at itunes.apple.com

The insurance king: Urban Jungle

Insurance start-up, Urban Jungle, recently made a daring bid to shake up the insurance world. With young urban renters in mind, it launched a revolutionary platform that makes sorting out home insurance as easy as possible. Urban Jungle allows its partners to serve insurance quotes through their own apps.

For more information and to sign up, visit the partners page or contact partnerships@myurbanjungle.com

11

blockchain

HOW BLOCKCHAIN COULD SHAKE UP YOUR BUSINESS The Bitcoin bubble is hogging the headlines – thanks to frenzied speculation and its unstable price – but this controversial cryptocurrency has gifted the world something much bigger: blockchain. Bitcoin’s digital scaffolding has caught the eye of some of the most innovative companies and entrepreneurs with its versatile, game-changing features. Wired journalist Gian Maria Volpicelli explores its uses in business What is blockchain? Think of it as a neverending Excel spreadsheet. It is a digital ledger that can make a permanent record of an infinite number of transactions, but unlike Excel, a blockchain does not exist on a single server. Rather it is run collectively by a decentralised swarm of computers (or nodes), a design choice that makes it hard to tamper with. There is no need to back up, unlike an Excel spreadsheet saved on a single computer that may one day fail, get stolen, or be hacked.

These features make blockchain technology a smart, secure solution for carrying out and keeping track of any kind of transactions – not only cryptocurrency transactions – between a number of parties, without relying on any middleman acting as a central authority.

Over the last few years, the technology has been trialled and applied in a vast range of sectors – from banking to logistics, and even diamond trading. Blockchain recently gained mainstream visibility when Walmart announced a new partnership with IBM and Chinese retailer JD.com, the Blockchain Food Safety Alliance. The three giants teamed up in mid-2017 to use a decentralised ledger to track food items as they move from farmers to suppliers and so on, throughout the supply chain. The idea is to guarantee better food traceability and food safety.

That was not IBM’s only foray into blending blockchain tech and logistics.

In early 2018, following months of collaboration, IBM – which has developed its own blockchain – announced a joint venture with cargo giant Maersk. The objective? Building a blockchain-fuelled platform to bring more transparency to the international commerce ecosystem, and in the same breath allowing trading partners

12

to monitor the movement of freight in a secure and collaborative way.

Although logistics – and, perhaps obviously, banking – look like natural sectors where blockchain could be applied, there are several other fields currently experimenting with the disruptive technology. Diamond-mining companies are turning to London-based start-up Everledger to verify the provenance of precious stones and root out conflict diamonds. A similar process could be used to fight counterfeits in sectors

such as fashion and art, or to guarantee a fine wine’s authenticity. Music could be next: British singer Imogen Heap is working on a project aimed at harnessing blockchain tech to streamline the purchase of intellectual rights.

Last year, The Marketing Group launched a media agency with blockchain at its very core. London-based Truth promises to give advertisers full supply-chain transparency.

Its founder, Adam Hopkinson, explains that the advertising sector is particularly opaque: about 80% of companies using programmatic advertising worry about

how their money is spent, and fret over how many of their ads end up actually being seen by consumers, especially on third-party platforms. “At Truth we are planning to show and prove to advertisers that their money goes exactly where they think it’s going,” says Hopkinson. “We want to disintermediate the supply chain and make sure there are only practitioners who are doing the right thing – and blockchain allows us to create consensus across the value chain.”

First conceived 18 months ago, Truth is testing its product with multiple clients. The clients can see the blockchain technology in action via a dashboard, which records information related to their campaigns.

Hopkinson predicts that Truth – and other companies like it – is bound to radically change the way the industry works.

“Introducing blockchain will start to drive down advertising budget. Advertisers will become more aware that a lot of their money is being wasted. It shouldn’t have to be,” he says. “There’s quite a lot of disruption coming.”

Not everyone agrees on blockchain’s practicality. Analytics company Dun & Bradstreet’s Global Leader in Data Innovation, Saleem Khan, has publicly described blockchain as “a solution in search of a problem”. Among the issues dogging the novel technology du jour are worries over cybersecurity. Bitcoin’s blockchain itself is said to be unhackable, but several second-generation blockchains have been the target of malicious attacks.

Scalability and speed are also sticking points. The Bitcoin blockchain is able to manage only seven transactions per second; Ethereum (another popular platform) is slightly better at 15 transactions per second.

That is still too slow for many companies operating on a global scale. By comparison,

homeworkmagazine

An artist’s vision of blockchain

Visa’s payment network processes about 2,000 transactions every second.

Blockchain’s 10th birthday is approaching, yet this is a technology that is still undergoing growing pains. More than nine out of 10 of the 26,000 blockchain projects launched in 2016 are now defunct, according to analysis by consultancy firm Deloitte. Part of the problem is the sheer number of blockchains out there. They are not all designed to be compatible with one another. For blockchain technology to work

workspacegroup.co.uk

well in the future, blockchains cannot be limited to a single vendor or technology.

Some solutions allow communication between two blockchains at the same time, but London start-up Quant Network thinks it has the ultimate answer. It has filed a patent for Overledger, a connecting technology that it claims can match data across any number of ledgers. Quant claims that “different structures and working mechanisms make it harder to build a common interface” so instead, Overledger

addresses the issue by sitting on top of them rather than struggling to match them up.

Nevertheless, until the many issues are ironed out, blockchain technology is still yet to be adopted in business by the masses. ww Do you think blockchain technology could be useful to your sector and, if so, how? Are you already part of a blockchain? Share your thoughts by emailing homeworkeditor@workspace. co.uk or tweet @WorkspaceGroup using #homeworkmag

13

always plan ahead

Thursday 14th, Canada Water Culture Space A top panel of clued-up speakers, including Ocado and Ada Health, discuss the future of AI and its impact on all aspects of working life to come

London Tech Week 2018 - The future Impact of AI

Tuesday 12th–Thursday 14th, ExCel London Tech lovers take note: London Tech Week’s anchor event comprises eight conferences, 300 exhibitions, multiple live demonstrations and a host of networking opportunities

TechXLR8

june

Tuesday 22nd, Kennington Park This WBI Dinner will focus on the issues stemming from the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer

Workspace Business Insight Dinner

Tuesday 22nd–Wednesday 23rd, Olympia Conference Can’t get enough of VR, AR and MR? Don’t miss the best two-day conference in Europe, spanning augmented, virtual and mixed reality with 150 leading speakers, case-study led content and thought-provoking panel discussions

VR World London 2018

Thursday 17th, 15 Hatfields Get up to speed on cyber security. Find out how to instill good cyber hygiene across your organisation, what to do in the wake of a cyber attack and how to keep data safe from threat

Cyber Leadership 2018

Friday 11th, BT Centre See top speakers and sports aficionados discuss practical ways to engage new audiences

The Telegraph Business of Sport 2018

may

Monday 23rd, The Guardian, King’s Place Want to switch up the way you think about data? Delve into the world of art and design with designer Stefanie Posavec’s workshop

Guardian Masterclass: A creative approach to data: Hand-drawn data visualisation

Wednesday 18th–Thursday 19th, Olympia London Get ahead of the AI curve. This two-day conference showcases all that is new on the AI scene – covering everything from business intelligence, AI algorithms and deep learning, to virtual assistants and chatbots

Artificial Intelligence Conference & Exhibition Global 2018

Wednesday 11th, Emmanuel Centre Leonard Mlodinow talks of cutting-edge neuroscience and uncovers the secret to a flexible mind in an endlessly dynamic world

Elastic thinking: How to Think Flexibly in a Constantly Changing World, with Leonard Mlodinow

april

When your mind’s on more pressing matters, it’s easy to miss the business events that matter in London. That’s why we’ve done the searching for you. Be sure to check out our website for more unique Workspace events at workspace.co.uk/community/events From top: VR World, AI Conference & Exhibition, Women of Silicon Roundabout, Computing Conference, TechXLR8

workspace.co.uk/community/events

be sure to check our website for more unique Workspace events

Thursday 20th–Sunday 23rd, ExCel London An award-winning festival of ideas and discoveries that will leave your mind reeling. New Scientist takes over London for an unmissable five days of stimulating talks, exhibits, workshops and performances. Book your tickets now

New Scientist Live 2018: Festival of Ideas and Discovery

Thursday 20th, Jumeirah Carlton Tower In the retail industry? Find out more about the fast-evolving expectations of your consumers through in-depth interviews and panel debates addressing the hottest mega-trends in the retail world

FT Future of Retail Summit

september

Sunday 19th–Thursday 23rd, ExCel London Researchers and practitioners from data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics and big data come together

Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2018

august

Tuesday 10th–Thursday 12th, Holiday Inn Regent’s Park Two days packed with talks from industry experts on the state of the art in computer science, lectures by eminent scientists and discussion-oriented sessions with networking breaks

Computing Conference 2018

Monday 2nd–Sunday 8th, The Royal Society A free, week-long festival celebrating the cutting edge of UK science. Check out the Royal Society’s wide-ranging programme of events

Summer Science Exhibition 2018

july

Tuesday 26th–Wednesday 27th, ExCel London The UK’s vibrant centrepiece for women in tech is back. Head to east London and join the 3,000-strong movement of tech-savvy women

Women of Silicon Roundabout

Thursday 21st, 15 Hatfields UKAuthority shines a light on the advances in technology likely to revolutionise the future of healthcare, reducing pressures on hospital beds across the UK

Digital Health & Social Care 2018

“Environmental products were once considered niche, expensive and only for tree huggers�

Jonny Goldstone, MD at Green Tomato Cars

green tech

Below: Green Tomato Cars has been supplying eco-friendly transport in London since 2006

Forget launching space rockets to Mars, perhaps the most impressive of Elon Musk’s achievements has been to make renewable energy aspirational. The industry was once the preserve of eco-warriors, but entrepreneurs are now at its cutting edge – and making money. Fleur Macdonald investigates At lunchtime on a warm and sunny day in June last year, a milestone was crossed.

For the first time in Britain, renewables generated more electricity than coal and gas.

Power from wind, solar, hydro and woodpellet burning produced more than half the total energy of the UK. For a brief moment, the nation experienced what the future might look like.

workspacegroup.co.uk

The UK has committed to reduce emissions to at least a fifth of 1990 levels by 2050, under the Climate Change Act. The legal deadline should spur on governments to support green energy with investment.

This means huge business opportunities for UK companies working to reduce carbon emissions, increase renewable energy production and develop technologies and expertise in harnessing, distributing and (crucially) storing green energy. Growth in the low-carbon economy is estimated at 11% per year between 2015 and 2030, more than four times the overall projected growth of the economy.

Workspace pioneers

Businesses based at Workspace are jumping on the opportunities this presents. Never mind Uber, Green Tomato Cars has been

on a pioneering mission to transport Londoners without damaging the environment for well over a decade. Back in 2006, two City lawyers teamed up to create the city’s greenest car service, based in Q West in Brentford.

Environmental products were then considered niche, expensive and only for tree huggers, says Co-founder and MD, Jonny Goldstone. Today, Green Tomato Cars has more than 600 drivers on its books and more than 400 vehicles, such as the hybrid electric Toyota Prius. Its customers include big names such as the BBC, NHS and Sky. Goldstone says, “In 2018 we want to bring all of our fleet to low-emission, zero or hybrid vehicles.”

How? Green Tomato Cars is adding electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to its fleet, and removing diesel

17

green tech Below: It can take a company as little as five years to recoup its investment in a wind turbine installed by Norvento Enerxia

“43 million tons of electronic waste was generated in 2016” UN report

executive vehicles and replacing them with hybrid vehicles or plug-ins.

This goal is timely. The government’s blueprint for Britain’s low-carbon future, the Clean Growth Paper, announced subsidies for the purchase of low-emission taxis; Green Tomato Cars is applying for government-related grants. Transport for London is installing 150 rapid-charge points for taxis and commercial fleets by the end of this year.

Norvento Enerxia, established in Spain and now in the UK at Workspace’s The Light Box in Chiswick, develops, promotes and operates multi-renewable technologies. Its 25 turbines in the UK are used or owned by small businesses that have a reasonable energy usage, good wind resource, and, of course, space for a turbine. These range from factories and farms to a small port site on the south coast. It can take a business as little as five years to pay back the half a million or so spent on the turbine.

18

Backing batteries

Take-up of onshore wind generators has been greater than the government expected, says Robert Styles, Norvento’s Business Development Manager. “Eventually all these technologies need to become subsidyfree,” he says. “It’s just a question of how quickly the subsidies get removed before the industry is ready to stand on its own two feet.”

The main obstacle to this has been the unreliability of green energy; many sources of renewables are dependent on the weather. Plus, the electricity generated is not necessarily needed at that particular moment. The answer could lie in better batteries. In December, Tesla built the world’s largest ever lithium-ion battery next to a wind farm in southern Australia.

This is just the beginning. Musk is promising batteries for homes and commercial buildings, and Dyson is investing huge amounts in developing battery technology. Producing and using

energy locally will soon be the norm, says Styles. For that to be possible, “battery storage is going to become a very large part of all renewable installations”. Microgrids powered by renewable energy that is generated on site and stored in batteries are a long-term focus for Norvento.

Green workspaces

Green energy is a priority for Workspace.

It procures 100% renewable electric energy.

Solar photovoltaic panels have been installed at five Workspace centres, with 85 sq m of 230W panels fitted at The Record Hall in Hatton Garden alone. Six more business centres will follow suit in the near future, explains Karen Jamison, the company’s Energy and Sustainability Manager.

In addition to the solar panels at The Record Hall, nearly 300 sq m of green roof space has been added on two levels, including a wildflower turf vegetation layer.

The building’s design scored a BREEAM Excellent sustainability rating.

homeworkmagazine

Below: Camara Learning takes donated computers, reconditions them and sends them to schools in Africa. Teachers are trained in IT and the students supplied with educational programmes.

Workspace’s green warriors BBOXX designs, manufactures, distributes and finances plug-and-play solar systems. Currently based in the UK at The Light Box, and in Rwanda, Uganda and China, the team plans to bring electricity to 20 million people by 2020. bboxx.co.uk CAMCO CLEAN ENERGY works with developers, governments, banks and private investors to develop and finance clean-energy projects in Africa and internationally.

Based at Clerkenwell Workshops. camcocleanenergy.com Look out for smart sub-metering systems coming soon to Workspace; these allow customers to track their energy consumption. Jamison says, “A lot of our customers are focused on reducing their environmental impact.”

Green Tomato Cars, for example, has six offices at Workspace, which are ISO 14001 certified. This is an international standard for an environmental-management system, aimed at reducing the impact of a company’s operations on the environment. It can be used by any organisation regardless of its activity or sector. “Everyone has to do their bit,” says Goldstone.

Help the green cause

Coffee cups and the latte levy have hit the news lately but what about your computer?

43 million tons of electronic waste was generated in 2016, according to a UN report. That’s up 8% in only two years.

We’re producing e-waste at double the rate of plastic refuse. One company based at

workspacegroup.co.uk

Workspace has decided to do something about it – and you can help.

Social enterprise Camara Learning recycles computers and distributes them to schools. It performs safety checks, wipes data, installs educational programmes and ships them to Africa, where they are distributed to schools, and teachers are given IT training. Camara Learning plans to deliver 31,500 computers to schools in Ethiopia by March 2019, as well as expanding its programmes in Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia and Lesotho.

“The legal requirement is for computers to be recycled properly,” says Anna Norman, General Manager at Camara Learning. “And from an environmental perspective, it’s a no-brainer.” ww Do your bit and dispose of your e-waste safely. Camara Learning accepts all computers in good condition and welcomes large batches. Get in touch with Anna at annanorman@camara.org or call 020 8670 1225

LIMEJUMP pays you to adjust your energy consumption to balance the grid, helps you get a better price for your energy and gives you instant access to your energy data. Find the team in Kennington Park. limejump.com PARITY PROJECTS Based at Riverside Business Centre in Wandsworth, Parity Projects helps households and housing professionals improve the energy efficiency of their homes, making them warmer, more sustainable and cheaper to run. parityprojects.com EQUAL PRODUCTIONS is a global media network based in The Biscuit Factory, which produces a prime-time TV show for CNBC called Sustainable Energy. equalproductions.com

artificial intelligence

“Can AI live up to the hype?”

WELCOME TO THE MACHINE Human dreams of creating artificial intelligence (AI) are as old as civilisation itself. Countless sci-fi books and films – 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator and Ex Machina – have filled the popular imagination with colourful, often dystopian visions. Now, thanks to advances in processing power and machine-learning techniques, our fantasies are about to become reality. How will AI play out?

Arthur House asks some Workspace customers at the forefront of AI innovation to share their insights

We currently live in an age of weak AI: artificial intelligence focused on one narrow task, like Apple’s Siri. However, strong AI, or general artificial intelligence – a machine capable of performing a range of intellectual tasks at least as well as a human – is widely thought to be achievable within 10–20 years.

This astonishing progress, which is already underway, is driving what is being called the fourth Industrial Revolution: a fusion of the digital and physical worlds that will, with the help of robotics and nanotechnology, fundamentally change the way we live and work.

According to research firm Gartner’s annual Hype Cycle, an index that tracks

20

the progress of emerging technology trends, machine learning and deep learning – two of the most widespread AI techniques – reached peak hype in July last year. By Gartner’s own model, these two terms should have fallen into a “trough of disillusionment” by now, whereby interest wanes as experiments fail to deliver. And yet AI is still big news. Barely a day goes by without superintelligent computers or killer robots popping up in our newsfeeds. So what exactly is AI and how are businesses using it?

And can it ever live up to the hype?

If you’ve ever used a personal assistant like Siri or Alexa, listened to Spotify recommendations or received a fraud notification from your bank, you have used AI in your everyday life. For businesses and organisations, there are a dizzying number of AI applications, from customer-service chatbots to financial-market analysis.

All of these examples employ forms of machine learning. Its simplest version, known as supervised machine learning or predictive analytics, is basically an advanced form of statistics, in which humans feed a computer algorithm with training data to enable it to infer things about other data.

The more you train an algorithm, the better its predictions get.

DigitalMR, a company based at Workspace’s Vox Studios in Vauxhall,

uses machine learning to “listen” to online conversations for market-research purposes.

Various algorithms are in play at once.

One eliminates “noise” around certain keywords (for example, if you’re interested in posts mentioning Apple products, you don’t want results involving fruit). Other algorithms analyse text and annotate it with sentiment – positive, negative, neutral – and emotion such as love, hate, joy and sadness.

DigitalMR has also won several grants from Innovate UK, the government-affiliated innovation agency, to develop new machinelearning models.

These include the magic captioner, a tool that can not only recognise a logo of a brand within an image, but also automatically caption it with a sentence that describes what’s in the image, for example: “This is a group of friends drinking Coca-Cola at a picnic”. This capability enables brands to research from social media photos when and how their products are being consumed without having to actually look at the images.

AI-generated image captioning is cutting-edge stuff. “Apart from us, only Google and Microsoft have this capability right now,” says Michalis Michael, DigitalMR’s CEO. “It is not easy to synthesise the objects in an image and come up with a sentence that makes sense.”

homeworkmagazine

An artist’s representation of computer scientist Alan Turing

workspacegroup.co.uk

“Businesses can be using AI to crunch data a lot faster and reach insights that they couldn’t get their hands on before” Michalis Michael, CEO at DigitalMR

Deep learning

For its more advanced AI technology, DigitalMR uses a technique known as deep learning. This uses neural networks, which, as their name suggests, mimic the structure of the human brain and offer far more exciting and often unpredictable outcomes than “linear” algorithms trained by humans.

Deep learning can also be unsupervised, which essentially means that the machine can learn by itself. London-based company DeepMind caused a sensation in 2016 when its human-trained AlphaGo computer beat Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol at the board game Go. Last October, the company unveiled a new version, AlphaZero, which

DigitalMR is at the cutting edge of machine learning in market research, says its CEO, Michalis Michael

22

uses unsupervised machine learning. It beat the previous version 100-0. Neural networks are the future, paving the way towards strong AI, but for the moment there’s still a lot to discover about how they work and what they can do.

So what sort of businesses can take advantage of machine learning? In short, any business that needs to process data.

“Everybody deals with data and there’s lots of it around any business,” says Michael.

“So businesses can be using AI to crunch data a lot faster and reach insights that they couldn’t get their hands on before.” Machine learning makes it possible to sift through and find patterns in quantities of data that would take humans years to examine manually. In

Left: The MyDrive office at The Leather Market Below: Gavin Heavyside, CTO at MyDrive

order to find out which topics are driving conversations on social media, DigitalMR is able to drill down into millions of posts and know what they are about without reading them. “Ten years ago you would have had to read it,” says Michael. “Now we can push millions of posts through these tools in a few minutes and the posts come out on the other side annotated with emotions, sentiment or topics.”

MyDrive Solutions is another Workspace customer that uses machine learning to make sense of big data. The company, which is headquartered at The Leather Market in London Bridge, collects and analyses data from drivers’ smartphones to understand how safely they are driving. It creates scores for different aspects of driving, such as acceleration, braking, cornering or speed, and gives

workspacegroup.co.uk

them to the driver (via a smartphone app) and the driver’s insurance company. The aim is to encourage safer driving, which leads to lower premiums for the motorist and fewer payouts for the insurer. It’s the familiar “black box” insurance model, but using smartphone technology rather than onboard hardware. “The tech in an iPhone or Android is way in advance of anything inside the old black boxes fitted in cars,” says Gavin Heavyside, MyDrive’s CTO. “You’ve got GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes, all kinds of sensors to understand when and how people are driving.”

Harvesting this huge volume of secondby-second information from thousands of drivers is one thing, but analysing it is another – and that’s where machine learning comes in. MyDrive also uses machine learning to exclude data that

does not come from a car (similar to health apps that can tell whether someone is walking or running). It is also currently developing an AI model to guard against users being dangerously distracted by their phone while driving.

As for deep learning, MyDrive’s data scientists are researching its use in autonomous-vehicle control systems and computer vision, such as automatic detection of road signs and speed limits. Although some businesses are already employing deep learning in live products, Heavyside says that for now “there are a lot more people talking about it or experimenting with it, than using it, but that is changing fast”.

In the not-too-distant future, emerging technology known as quantum computing will allow data to be crunched even faster.

Heavyside is keeping an eye on how this

23

artificial intelligence

“Businesses that don’t adopt it are going to be overtaken by businesses that do – it’s like an arms race” Doug Ayres, MD at Filament

Above: Doug Ayres, MD at Filament at Cargo Works contemplates a robot-friendly future Right: Ben Gancz prizes human warmth

24

“step change in computing capability” progresses, but it may have its downsides.

“It introduces some challenges because it probably compromises all of the encryption that is currently in mainstream use.”

Until recently, machine learning was either too expensive or impossible for small and medium-sized businesses to get their hands on. These days it’s not only accessible; it’s fast becoming an imperative. “Businesses that don’t adopt it are going to be overtaken by businesses that do – it’s like an arms race,” says Doug Ayres, MD at Filament, an agency that advises and implements machinelearning techniques for clients from its office at Workspace’s Cargo Works in Waterloo.

Filament has devised conversational interfaces (chatbots) for clients including Deutsche Telekom and HSBC in America, enabling them to automate tasks in a way that simply wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago. It is currently working on a suite of tools that will allow companies to create their own machine-learning models without the need for in-house data scientists – making AI even more accessible for SMEs.

Like humans do

However, AI is no silver bullet, Ayres warns. We’re a “long way off general AI”, and so for now at least, it’s all about “computers and humans working together to do things better”.

Ben Gancz, Director at Qumodo, would agree on the importance of compatibility.

The company, which is based at The Print Rooms in Southwark, focuses on human interaction with AI, particularly in the defence, law-enforcement and medical sectors. One of its projects uses AI technology to help adults and children remove explicit images of themselves from the internet, saving police and moderators time. As well as developing AI tech itself, which has also been funded by Innovate UK, Qumodo is researching human psychology in order to integrate AI better into human teams. “There is maximum hype around AI at the moment,” says Gancz, “But it won’t meet people’s expectations unless there’s more investment into interfaces and getting people to have confidence in these technologies.”

homeworkmagazine

Ben Gancz, Director at Qumodo, The Print Rooms

“We are horrified by the thought that a driverless car might ever crash, but somehow okay with the idea that human errors cause crashes all the time” At the moment we have unrealistic expectations that AI will be 100% foolproof. We are horrified by the thought that a driverless car might ever crash, while somehow okay with the idea that human errors cause crashes all the time. “People have an inf lated expectation of what AI can do, and when it doesn’t do that it can really turn people off,” says Gancz. The challenge is getting people to “appropriately calibrate their trust” in AI – to have confidence in it, but not too much. “Policemen and soldiers need to really know whether what they’re being told is a good idea or not. We don’t want people to blindly trust it.”

What about the tasks that no longer require any human interaction? The loss of jobs to AI is already happening, and is a major ethical issue that needs to be explored further. “Machines are going to take over a lot of repetitive tasks that people get paid for now,” says Ayres. Many fear that technology will make people redundant, depress wages and lead to a stagnation in living standards unless we take action now.

workspacegroup.co.uk

So how concerned should we be about the rise of the robots? Last year, Facebook had to shut down a pair of its AI robots after they reportedly invented their own language. Although something of an AI evangelist, Michalis Michael can’t rule out the possibility of the machines taking over. “We should be very careful not to get to a Terminator-type scenario,” he says.

“Politicians should start discussing the legal and ethical frameworks around AI because at the moment there aren’t any.”

Others believe that our fears about AI and automation have been overstated.

“Technology automates tasks, rather than jobs,” says Benedict Dellot, co-author of The Age of Automation, a report commissioned by the Royal Society of Arts. “If a worker loses one task to automation, it’s likely that another will come along and replace it.”

Dellot was a panel speaker at Workspace’s Rise of the Bots Business Insight Dinner in February. He sees potential for AI to create jobs in the IT sector, and to complement workers, rather than replace them. For example, AI models can help doctors reach

diagnosis faster, or farmers to detect and treat crop diseases.

Gancz is also optimistic. While acknowledging that machines will inevitably become superintelligent, he doesn’t think this will necessarily lead to our destruction or enslavement. He believes that in a world of automation, people will value human interaction all the more, and our desire for human experiences might see an expansion of, for example, the services industry. “People have coffee machines in their house that make very good coffee but they still love going to coffee shops and paying five quid for someone to make it for them,” he says. “It’s the human connection that makes it valuable.”

There may be scary moments ahead, but whether you’re terrified or excited by AI, it seems unlikely to be a flash in the pan.

Businesses should embrace its potential or risk being left behind. ww Are you an AI fan? Tell us how your business uses AI by tweeting @WorkspaceGroup #homeworkmag

25

RISE OF THE BOTS Chatbots or “conversational interfaces” were among the trends up for discussion at Workspace’s Business Insight Dinner at The Leather Market on 20th February. The WBI dinner programme invites Workspace customers to hear experts discuss the hottest topics in business in an informal networking atmosphere. First up at the Rise of the Bots evening were Benedict Dellot and Dr Matthew Fenech, who discussed the impact of automation on society. After dinner, an expert panel shared their experience of developing chatbots, co-bots and robots. The event, which attracted an audience of more than 100, was chaired by Phil Westcott, a Managing Director at Filament. Here are some exciting discoveries from the chatbot world that we took away from the event.

How will bots transform customer relationships?

“People are very forgiving of bots when they go wrong – if they’re upfront that they’re a bot” Jacob Tomlinson, Lead Engineer at the Met Office

26

Chatbots enable businesses to start ongoing relationships with their customers. This is revolutionary, says Rory McElearney. “Let’s say you’ve got a Facebook pop-up messenger on your website. Not only can you sell to people and inform them, but during the process of say, a package being delivered, you can be messaging them, following up with them, gaining really high-quality feedback from them. It’s an absolute sea change in the relationship between the customer and the business, and it’s one that’s going to completely change the world.”

Is it possible for bots to gauge customers’ moods?

Filament has recently developed a customer

service agent for Deutsche Telekom that comes with emotional empathy built in. “The bot tries to figure out if the person it’s talking to is happy, angry or sad and tailors the conversation accordingly,” says McElearney, Conversational Interfaces Lead at Filament.

Do we really want bots to be more human?

Alan Turing, the father of computer science, imagined a machine being able to convince a human that it was another human – the famous Turing Test. However, according to Jacob Tomlinson, who is developing a weather chatbot for the Met Office, chatbots should have personality but not try to pass themselves off as human.

“People are very forgiving of bots when they go wrong – if they’re upfront about the fact that they’re a bot”.

How can bots help you breathe easy?

Asthma suffers can breathe easy. Filament is working with a pharmaceutical client that produces inhalers, and is prototyping a chatbot that lets you know if you’re entering an area of poor air quality. “It gives you real-time prompts if you’re going to have an asthma attack,” says Westcott. ww If this has whetted your appetite, you can watch video recordings of both panel discussions by visiting workspace.co.uk/WBI/Rise-Of-TheBots. And to find out more about the WBI dinner programme, visit workspace.co.uk/community

homeworkmagazine

Familiar sight?

You’re busy. Very busy. So the last thing on your mind is finding a trustworthy cleaning company to keep on top of your office chaos.

Olivers Mill is Workspace’s trusted cleaning operator and for good reason. ISO accredited for quality and with a DBS-checked workforce, you’ll love the fact that you can pick and choose the services you want. No equipment is stored at your office, there’s secure access management and no long contracts.

Get a quote for the services you need by getting in touch via workspace@oliversmill.co.uk

Because life is too short for messy offices!

oliversmill.co.uk/workspace Cleaners are paid the Living Wage which is more than the Minimum Wage, and all rubbish and recycling is processed in line with the Workspace Waste Strategy

robotics

ROBOT READY Meet the robots of tomorrow that can give a helping hand in the workplace and at home in the kitchen. The feared robot rebellion will just have to wait, writes Guardian contributor Rich McEachran By 2030, nearly a third of all jobs in the UK may have been lost to automation.

Manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, as well as administrative and support services, are most at threat, according to the gloomy prediction from audit firm PwC. Such is the fear that humans could be pushed out of the workplace that a “robot tax” has been called for by Jeremy Corbyn, Bill Gates and the European Union.

However, imagine a world where not only are robots commonplace, they also boost our industries – helping us to work faster and smarter. Taxed robots or not, the reality is that the automated future is unlikely to be anything like that depicted in dystopian fiction and on the big screen.

The chances are there will be no scary system that takes over the human race, like Skynet from the Terminator franchise, but rather machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI), and instead of having to compete for jobs with robots, we can collaborate with them.

Take assembly lines. Whether an independent food brand or a manufacturer of niche goods, speed is of the essence when it comes to packing orders and ensuring timely delivery. However, it might be that the logistics leave much to be desired. Meet Workspace customer, Intelligent Robots.

Zheng Lin is the company’s Co-founder and CEO, based in The Biscuit Factory in Bermondsey. Lin and his team are developing RPuck, a self-driving robot

28

designed to be deployed in warehouses to transports goods between locations more easily. “Traditional warehouse automation solutions, such as conveyor belts, are incredibly painful to both implement and maintain. They’re pretty inefficient and rigid. There’s also no flexibility in the locations that goods can be moved between… and flexibility is key for dynamic logistics,” says Lin. RPuck has environmental awareness, thanks to a process known as sensor fusion, which means it can safely operate around human workers without bumping into them. Different sensors enable a robot to detect obstacles and avoid collisions. The more a robot learns about the environment it’s operating in, the better it will become at navigating it. “It’s also cost-effective, because our Robot-as-a-Service model means there’s no upfront investment for users and all maintenance and upgrading [of the software] is handled at our end,” Lin adds.

Maintenance can be done remotely, unlike maintaining and upgrading equipment like conveyor belts, which rely on a skilled engineer either to be on-site or called out. Beyond the warehouse, robots can help with intricate tasks that require extremely fine motor skills, such as product development and testing.

Rich Walker is Managing Director at Shadow Robot Company, based at Leroy House in Islington and Spectrum

House in Camden. The company sells dexterous robotic hands to other companies developing robots like Moley Robotics, which prototyped the first automated kitchen a few years ago and is expected to launch to consumers later this year.

Walker believes that robots have the potential to be more reliable and agile, although there is still some way to go.

However, with each attempt, a dexterous robotic hand becomes more nimble and adept at mastering tasks. These hands also have ultra-sensitive touch sensors built into the fingertips.

“Most robots have grippers and are able to pick up a specific object, but they can’t yet perform as well as humans. We have cognitive skills that make it easy for us to reach out and handle an object, even if we haven’t seen it before,” says Walker. “By using better physical hardware and building in AI and machine learning, we at Shadow are hoping to give robots the same abilities.”

Leaving complex and repetitive tasks in safe and capable robotic hands will allow companies to focus more of their efforts on the creative and moneymaking aspects of their business. At a TED talk in November, Sebastian Thrun, educator and entrepreneur at Google X, argued that once humans break the chains of dull, tedious work, we can unleash our full creativity. “I believe all of us are insanely creative,” he explained. “[AI] will empower us to turn creativity into action.” ww

“Robots can’t yet perform as well as humans.

We at Shadow are hoping to give robots the same abilities as humans” Rich Walker, MD at Shadow Robot Company, The Biscuit Factory

A working prototype from Shadow Robot Company

marketing Below: The ICCI 360 Arena, developed by Plymouth University in collaboration with Workspace customer Igloo Vision Bottom: Mike Follett

THE MARKETING MAESTROS Marketing is a curious discipline: half science, half craft, all about persuasion. It’s also in the middle of a revolution, as innovative new companies rewrite the rules. Ed Owen meets the Workspace customers driving the mutiny

30

homeworkmagazine

“We hope to democratise attention

technologies like eye tracking, so that anyone can use it, and make sense of it, anywhere” Mike Follett, MD at Lumen Research, ScreenWorks

Just 20 years ago, marketing was a very different discipline. Science played a minor role in the key brand and marketing decisions of the late 90s, more Mad Men, less Blade Runner. Today, it’s the sector most altered by the digital revolution as customers move to digital media, making them harder to find, while groundbreaking technologies turn the sector upside-down.

Marketing principles have not changed but the technologies and culture are unrecognisable. This was first driven by the tech giants like Google and Facebook, but it’s now pushed forward by smaller, more agile, entrepreneurial companies with a global reach, attracting some of the biggest brands on the planet to their innovative technologies and approach.

The science of selling

Take testing, for example. It’s one of the oldest principles of marketing. One of the most reliable ways to test your marketing is to see how people interact with it. Eye tracking is the gold standard; it is used by psychologists in laboratory experiments when testing concepts like attention, and it is used by marketers to help judge how well creative ads work.

Eye-tracking technologies monitor how our eyes move and absorb messaging like ads in a newspaper or on a computer screen. This type of testing gives the marketer reliable numbers with which to work. It can show how different versions of an ad might draw or repel the eye. Eye tracking is also used extensively in improving the user experience of websites because it shows how the eye moves around a page and thus how the user is drawn into every part of a website.

The first eye-tracking experiments were conducted about 100 years ago. Back then, subjects often had their heads in a Clockwork Orange-style vice so their eye movements could be monitored accurately.

Today eye tracking is much easier thanks

workspacegroup.co.uk

to the use of special computers and cameras to track eye movements, usually in controlled conditions. It is still as valuable, but it is costly. What if it was cheaper?

Mike Follett is Managing Director at Lumen Research, an eye-tracking specialist based at Workspace’s ScreenWorks in Islington. Lumen has revolutionised this kind of research by developing software that can turn a phone or a laptop into an eye-tracking kit. Follett says, “We developed the tech to turn webcams into eye-tracking cameras. The software uses a complicated algorithm to track the glints reflected from your eyes.” This feat has maintained the accuracy of the testing – and reduced costs for eye tracking tenfold.

Moving out of the laboratory allows for an increase in scale, but cost and time input have plummeted.

Follett elaborates, “It gives us the chance to compare demographics: mothers and their kids, or people from different regions or different countries.

Intent can be tested. We can do studies anywhere in the world, but from here. It’s hugely scalable. We hope to democratise attention technologies like eye tracking, so that anyone can use it, and make sense of it, anywhere.”

360 virtual view

Another cutting-edge technology adopted enthusiastically by marketers now, but that has had a slow development burn, is virtual reality (VR). When the film The Lawnmower Man explored VR back in 1992, it was deemed science fiction. Today it’s in the home – and the VR industry is growing at an exponential rate. The sector was estimated to be worth around $2 billion in 2016, and it is projected to grow to $26.9 billion by 2022, according to Zion Market Research.

The appeal comes partly from the mind-bending immersion in virtual

31

“Brands are having to work a lot harder, combining different elements with human interaction” Phil Watton, MD at Lodestar

worlds, but also from faster and cheaper processing power and complex components taken from mobile phones, which have come down massively in price. The familiar headsets are not the only way to experience VR. Workspace customer Igloo Vision takes a different approach, eschewing the headsets for a wrap-around experience in a domed structure that can suck in the senses for larger groups of people.

Igloo’s Head of Communications, Peter Halliday, based at Parma House in Wood Green, explains, “Our company has been around for about 10 years and has always been of interest to brands for different types of experiential marketing. Then, Facebook acquired [VR company] Oculus and everything changed. Suddenly VR was hot, and people were creating 360 and VR content.”

However, headsets have limitations. The user has to sit down and the headset has a tether, which limits to around 90 degrees what the user can see. Igloo’s domes overcome these problems, transforming the experience from singular to shared, thus creating a much more powerful experience: shared VR. “This way the audience engages in the whole horizon,” says Halliday.

The human edge

In fact, all forms of experiential marketing have been transformed, according to Phil

32

Watton, MD at Lodestar, a Workspace customer based at The Light Box, which manages special experiential campaigns for large brands. “The idea is to create experiences that produce valued moments – giving something to those participating, whether digitally or not. Brands are having to work a lot harder, combining different elements with human interactions,” he says.

Lodestar adopts various new technologies to give something special and memorable to the consumer, but the technology alone isn’t enough. “After a while, things become run-of-the-mill to people. One example is [virtual-reality headset] Oculus Rift, which gives a very insular, singular experience. Sharing experiences makes them more effective.

You have to make experiences as dynamic and engaging as possible. It’s all about the creative,” he says.

The automotive sector is a good example. Potential customers can find out a huge amount about a car from specialist magazines, TV shows and websites, so marketing campaigns have to give something extra. That something extra could be an experiential campaign at an airport or in a shopping centre, for example.

You would see the car sitting there in all its glory, with the added digital element of something like VR to help bring the car to life. Customers can take a virtual tour of

the car, and modify things like the exterior colour and the wheel rims. Even with the exciting technology add-ons, however, human presence can still have the edge, particularly for luxury or high-end vehicles.

Watton explains, “We could use professional drivers, for example – they are seen as an expert third party, particularly if the car is high performance or 4x4.” These drivers would be paid to talk to customers about the car, or to staff the stand.

Using real people has an advantage: people make these experiential campaigns work. Another example where humans improve the customer experience can be demonstrated by The Chat Shop, based at Workspace’s Q West. The Chat Shop manages communications for brands using a range of channels such as email, social, chat and more. It has discovered a nearperfect way to communicate with people: other people.

According to The Chat Shop’s Head of Marketing, Seán Cotter, research it conducted last year came to a simple conclusion. “We know that the human touch in digital means empathy. That’s what can’t be replaced by bots, scripts and AI. Empathy is about moving away from transactional experiences and towards the perfect experience. 73% of customers want to speak to a human and have an empathetic experience when they have a problem or

homeworkmagazine

marketing

Left: Chatting at The Chat Shop Below left: Experience the future at FutureFest festival

Meet the pioneers at Workspace LUMEN RESEARCH ScreenWorks Cutting-edge eye tracking for the BBC, Chanel, Unilever, Vodafone, Tesco, BT lumen-research.com

make a transaction. Digital needs a human heart to be effective,” he says.

That’s not to say that technology doesn’t inform The Chat Shop’s business – it’s at the heart of it, giving the handler useful insights into the customer. “We have technology that allows us to pinpoint where a customer is on a website and evaluate where they are in their journey, so that our team can reach out with a message that’s suited to that person’s unique point of view,” he says.

It is perhaps a reflection of our digitally obsessed world that customers frequently believe they are talking to bots, not people, and give handlers their own version of the Turing Test to try and catch them out.

Results are compelling. The Chat Shop says its methods boost satisfaction to 99% and marketing leads by half.

The future is bright

Quite what post-Brexit Britain will look like remains uncertain, but what is certain is that innovative companies like Igloo, Lumen, Lodestar and The Chat Shop are precisely the kinds of businesses that will keep the economy buoyant.

Lumen’s Follett says, “We have to have home-grown technologies we can export to every corner of the world. Pre-orders for our software product, which has not even officially launched, has meant we

workspacegroup.co.uk

have not needed to do any marketing.

People are coming to us.”

Halliday agrees, and says that the UK has a definite edge in creative services.

“We have noticed that the UK has the best content creators in the world. We have offices in the US, in New York and LA, but the content creators are not as good as the ones here. British companies like Visualise, Rewind, Framestore are all used by US clients who come here for world-class marketing, digital and post-production services,” he says.

Workspace’s shared working environment is a boon for creative services like marketing. Follett draws an analogy with the famous lobby built in animation studio Pixar’s headquarters, designed for people from different disciplines to run into one another and share ideas.

“The Workspace environment is really helpful for us,” he says. “We constantly bump into people who come from very different companies. This helps us because it’s interesting to have friendly discussions with other people from dance companies, fashion, modelling agencies, all these different areas, and hone our pitch.”

Marketing may be changing but the next changes are driven by companies with cutting-edge technologies who work for the biggest brands on the planet, based not far from you. ww

The Chat Shop Q West Next-generation customer service for Hitachi, Yell, Skoda, Mercedes-Benz, Curzon Cinemas thechatshop.com Lodestar The Light Box Emotional experiences for Fiat, Philips, Jeep, Alfa Romeo, Nvidia computing lodestar.co.uk Igloo Vision Demo centre at Parma House Immersive and shared VR for Adidas, Toyota, Médecins Sans Frontières, GSK, UNHCR, Ford igloovision.com

Igloo Vision

33

neuroscience

the neural network Smart businesses are swotting up on the brain’s inner workings to assess employees and customers alike, in order to find the most suitable employees and craft the best customer offering. Discover more about the psychological tools that can divulge details as diverse as employees’ ethical preferences and reveal the biases that feed the human mind and shape behaviour, writes cognitive scientist turned journalist, Stav Dimitropoulos

CGI render of a neural network

“Emotions are powerful and more likely to have an impact on decisions than rational calculation�

David Hall, Executive Director at Behaviour Change

neuroscience

“Loss is more important

The previous century witnessed the explosion of the science of psychology and the early tendrils of groundbreaking fields like behavioural economics and neuroscience. The age-old world of business was swept along It was Adam Smith who first coined the theory of the “invisible hand” – the idea that when we make a self-interested decision, say to buy a fancy dress and a designer handbag, it gives a helping hand to the wider economy.

From the “invisible hand” evolved the concept of the “invisible mind” – the (still) uncharted territory of emotion and reason, of feelings and logic, of hidden desires and buried intentions – to explain why we might buy that particular dress or handbag.

36

Today, science can dive deep into the workings of the human mind. It can put the brain under scans to see which parts of it light up when we see an advertisement.

It can design tests that will predict which employee is least susceptible to corruption.

It can even take advantage of the mind’s desire for simplicity, to help businesses and organisations design campaigns that will most readily be adopted by people.

And for the scientists and experts who are leading these advances, we are only just seeing the beginning.

BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS: No, we are not perfectly rational customers – and successful businesses know that.

To understand the way customers think, first take a brief sidestep into the world of

award-winning economic theory. Last year, Richard Thaler won the Nobel prize for economics for “providing a more realistic analysis of how people think and behave when making economic decisions”. A man in lifelong pursuit of behavioural economics, Thaler proved that people are predictably irrational in ways that transcend economic theory. He was not the first to speak about human irrationality.

Fifteen years earlier, two psychologists named Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky also won a Nobel prize, pointing out how prone humans are to bad judgment and rigid thinking. Should we want to improve our reality, we had better start improving our own way of grasping it, Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory said, in a nutshell.

This theory not only went on to shape behavioural economics, but also to provide

homeworkmagazine

than winning”

Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University

Brain neurons rendered in CGI

fascinating insights into what influences people’s decisions as purchasers.

“Many of these doctrines can help businesses of today understand what clients want,” says Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University in St Louis. “For example, one of prospect theory’s central biases is loss aversion, which says that loss is more important than winning.”

Imagine your business is Netflix. You give your clients a free trial period of three months, after which it is up to them to decide whether they should switch to paid subscription or not. This means that after three months of enjoying Netflix, they are now faced with the pain of losing it.

Add temporal discounting to the mix, and watch sales spike. This is the phenomenon that if you anticipate

workspacegroup.co.uk

the value of a reward at a much later stage than initially promised, the wow factor dies down.

Padoa-Schioppa explains, “Let’s say you want to buy an electric car from Toyota.

What do you do first? You seek information, so Toyota must make sure you know it sells electric cars through advertising. But then comes the knowledge of temporal discounting. We tend to defer payments, which means that if Toyota wants to make the sell, it must be aware that the human mind finds it much more preferable to pay little by little, in instalments.”

What role does emotion play in customer engagement? Brand-attachment theory says that consumers are likely to prefer emotionally or culturally significant products. Marketers must therefore know how to evoke soulful emotions like joy,

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his groundbreaking research on behavioural economics

37

A 3D render of the brain

“Humans can be fickle - customer loyalty is not guaranteed for life”

David Hall, Executive Director at Behaviour Change

38

sorrow and fear in order to secure an emotionally charged bond between the customer and their brand.

David Hall is Executive Director at Behaviour Change. Based in Workspace’s Archer Street Studios in Soho, the not-forprofit social enterprise addresses major social and environmental challenges by developing ideas that help people embark upon positive action.

“Emotions are powerful and more likely to have an impact on decisions than rational calculation. A good example would be World Wildlife Fund, whose association with iconic animal species and a cute panda logo is a far more effective money-raising tool than rational arguments about climate change or species depletion,” Hall says.

Yet humans can be fickle. Even if businesses establish a long-term emotional relationship or attachment to a brand, customer loyalty is not guaranteed for life.

Successful brands are those that tap into another “source of gold”, says Hall, namely mental shortcuts. Our brains use these quick and intuitive algorithms to give a rough answer to a reasoning question in a fairly easy way (if you want examples of such

shortcuts, look no further than educated guesses or guesstimates).

Hall advises that brands should focus on those priceless moments of decision that lead to impulse purchases, rather than solely building long-term loyalty. The reason?

Shortcuts ease the load on your brain when it has to decipher cognitive problems, and what better than offering less homework to a brain that’s constantly bombarded by nonstop waves of information?

“An effective brand might be one that makes it easy for you to do the thing you want to do, such as Uber; cuts through complexity like Apple; or is simply the thing you’ve done so many times before it becomes a habit, like the toothpaste you buy,” Hall says. “They all help people shortcut a decision by cutting out the need for effortful thought.”

THE POWER OF PSYCHOMETRIC TESTS: Hire better staff that stick around and support the team.

It is estimated that the wrong hiring decision can set organisations back by 30%–176% of the annual salary of each vacant position.

Perhaps that explains why the popularity

homeworkmagazine

AT WORKSPACE WE LIKE TO GET PEOPLE TOGETHER

WBI Dinner Westbourne Studios

 House of VOGA class, Pill Box

 Knowledge Peers, Feeding your Business Collaboration, Innovation and Creativity, Westbourne Studios

Our main priority is to help your business thrive through providing buzzing communities and support networks There’s always plenty of business and social events happening here at Workspace, designed to make networking easy, inspire fresh motivation and provide you with the opportunity to learn new skills.

 The Record Hall Launch Party

You can also host your own business events in our striking atrium spaces, check them out at workspace.co.uk/ meeting-rooms/ event-space

That’s not to say we’re all work and no play, with pub quizzes, yoga and cocktail making nights aplenty.

See what we’ve got coming up at

workspace.co.uk/ community/events

neuroscience Right: Brain cells colourised via computer to be visible microscopically Below: Talking neuroscience at the WBI dinner (l-r) Joseph Devlin, James Turner, James Naylor, Andy Goll

of psychometrics – tools that measure psychological abilities and aptitudes – has exploded in the last two decades in all stages of the recruitment process.

“All humans are susceptible to erroneous judgments,” says Sabina Socias, UK Branch Manager at Central Test, a Workspace customer in Kennington Park.

This international publisher provides psychometric assessments and training to meet challenges in the human-resources sector. Such challenges include trying to avoid wasting money and resources training a recruit who doesn’t fit the role; helping those employees who prove indispensable for the business to juggle their personal and professional life; and helping business owners manage a pool of diverse employees.

“Psychometrics bypass the biases and stereotypes we all have and allow for a fairer assessment,” Socias explains. They allow companies to make more responsible assessments, and thus to be more socially responsible.” However, they are also highly adjustable.

The latest trend is to bypass traditional personality assessments in favour of situational-judgment tests, to see how well a candidate fits into the company culture.

40

These types of psychological aptitude tests put people in work-related scenarios and assess their reactions. “This is a more valid assessment of people’s abilities and behaviour,” says Socias.

Situational-judgment tests make it easier to see if an individual fits with the company culture because they place them in a particular context where they have to project themselves and say how they would react or behave, whereas traditional questionnaires ask about past behaviour.

Central Test uses emotional-intelligence questionnaires, tests designed to measure how people understand, manage and interpret their own emotions, and those of others. These types of tests are mushrooming in popularity. Simultaneously, there is a huge shift in mentality in the workplace.

Previously, a sign of a good employee was a loyal worker who had remained in a company for a long stretch of time. In 2018, nomads rule.

“We live in a culture where the new generation does not tend to stay in one position for long. You have to change jobs perhaps every two or five years to show that you have variety in your resume, but this makes companies suffer financially. It is very

homeworkmagazine

“ Psychometrics bypass the biases and stereotypes we all have and allow for a fairer assessment�

Sabina Socias, UK Branch Manager at Central Test

neuroscience

“It is very expensive to hire and train people, and then lose them” Sabina Socias, UK Branch Manager at Central Test

Keen and committed employees are not a panacea for businesses.

Ethics matter too. Ethicsassessment tools are fiercely on the rise

Above: Testing at Neuro-Insight Right: Heather Andrew, CEO of Neuro-Insight

42

expensive to hire and train people, and then lose them,” says Socias.

Therefore, retaining committed and engaged employees is of the essence, which is why company culture and employee wellbeing are so important. Workplace success is no longer only about chunky salaries; it is also about good working conditions in a balanced environment.

Still, keen and committed employees are not a panacea for businesses. Ethics matter too. Ethics-assessment tools, which are used in onboarding to measure integrity at work or whether employees are likely to engage in unethical behaviour, are fiercely on the rise. Central Test has created a tool that evaluates attitudes towards counterproductive workplace behaviours, because attitudes are a strong predictor of behaviour. A candidate who tolerates or finds it normal to engage in unethical work behaviour is more likely to engage in unethical behaviour themselves. “We

also look at people’s attitudes towards other people’s behaviours and towards their own behaviour, so we can see whether they are likely to tolerate unethical behaviour in other people or to tolerate it in their own behaviour,” Socias says.

“This tool could not be more modern,” she continues. “It speaks to the problems of bullying, corruption and discrimination we are widely seeing today.”

FUTURE TRENDS: Will neuroscience corner the market?

What’s the last frontier for humans to explore? Artificial intelligence? Immortality?

Space? The ocean? Or is it the 1.4kg mass of grey and white matter that fills the upper part of your bony head? If you went with the last option, you are certainly a fan of neuroscience. Neuroscience studies how the nervous system develops, how it is built and what it does. It focuses on the question of how neural layers underlie certain human

Join our fast-growing network of creative co-working clubs

As part of Club Workspace we’ve been able to immerse ourselves in an environment of like-minded professionals, which has opened up new ways of thinking and doing.

It was really easy to get started. We just rocked up with our laptops – that was all.

Jimmy Williams, Urban Jungle, Club Workspace, Kennington Park

19 London locations

Business grade Wi-Fi

Connect with over 4,000 businesses

Bursting events calendar

Bookable meeting rooms

Rolling monthly membership

Find out more at

workspace.co.uk/co-working

neuroscience Heather Andrew, CEO at Neuro-Insight

“So much decision-making is based on processes that happen subconsciously”

Above: Joseph Devlin, Head of Experimental Psychology at University College London

44

(and animal) behaviours. Neuroscience has made impressive leaps over the past years; businesses are increasingly looking into the brain’s foldings to investigate what makes customers tick. “This is because we know now that so much decision-making is based on processes that happen subconsciously,” says Heather Andrew, CEO at NeuroInsight, a world leader in neurosciencebased market research, based at Workspace’s Metal Box Factory.

“Let’s say you ask people how many times they went to the cinema last month or what the name of their dog is. People should be able to tell you those sorts of things, but when you start talking to them about the motivations behind their behaviour, then things change. Often people just don’t know. And, even if they know, they might not be willing to tell you. And that is where neuroscience comes in.”

Neuro-Insight uses Steady State Topography (SST), a technology that records and measures electrical signals in the brain in order to build a second-bysecond picture of brain activity. “We can then link that to behaviour. We can identify the cognitive processes that correlate with decision-making in purchase behaviour.

And we know that the brain’s responsive behaviour can be more accurate than spoken responses,” says Andrew.

Joseph Devlin, Head of Experimental Psychology at University College London, is in firm agreement. “Neuroscience can help tackle problems that arise when businesses target only the conscious spheres of human activity, which are full of irrationality,” Devlin says.

SST is used to assess how well advertising works. A classical study on smoking highlights its advantages. In 2011, researchers Emily Falk and Elliot Berkman designed three different advertising campaigns to get people to stop smoking.

They brought a normal focus group together and asked members to say which campaign was the most effective. They then put them in magnetic resonance imaging – a medical imaging technique that produces threedimensional, detailed, anatomical images –

and watched their brain activity during the time they watched the three ads.

Devlin explains, “If you asked them which ad was more interesting, they answered that A was better than B, which was better than C, but if you looked at their brain activity in terms of the most rewarding experience, the best option was B followed by C followed by A. They repeated the procedure with different groups and when the time came to test these ads in the real world with hundreds of thousands of people, they found that the results based on the brain responses were more accurate than those based on spoken responses.”

So neuroscience finds our brain responses to be a far superior truth index than what comes out of our mouths, but which are the specific parts of the brain that drive these responses, say in the arena of the economy? The whole brain is involved in purchase behaviour, but some areas are particularly important for predicting it.

The limbic system in the middle of the brain is the most ancient set of brain structures that mediates our emotions and memories. Devlin elaborates, “This is involved in emotional processing and also to some extent in reward processing.

If somebody walks up to you on the street and gives you £10 just because they are nice, you have a shot of dopamine in that alley, a brain chemical that will indicate an unexpected reward.”

Then there is the very front section of the brain – the medial prefrontal cortex – which is masterful at controlling cognitive functions such as planning, attention, problem-solving, error-monitoring, decision-making, social cognition and working memory. “This seems to be a particularly important part of the brain for encoding how much you value a choice,” says Devlin. “If you love chocolate and somebody gives you chocolate, your medial cortex will appreciate that with a lot of activation.”

Devlin is quick to point out that these parts of the brain feed into both emotion and logic. This is because the limbic system includes some of the key emotional centres

homeworkmagazine

The test threw up some unwelcome surprises – and useful pointers

of the brain such as the amygdala. This almond-shaped structure is responsible for triggering the primordial fight-or-flight response. The limbic system is also attached to one of the most evolved regions of the brain, which is crucial for decision-making and digesting information, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

To understand brand attachment from a neuroscience standpoint, this is the area of the brain we need to examine. Devlin says, “When you choose to buy a product there are a couple of things going on in your brain. You have some kind of emotional attachment to the product you want to buy. You also have some sort of trust in it, trust that you are buying something you will like. Or perhaps it is a matter of habit.

All these are essentially subconscious processes. Your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex takes the relevant information and guides the decision you are going to make as a consumer.”

The brain works by association. If we get a tidbit of information, we link it to other tidbits we perceive to be of the same type, explains Andrew. She says, “Think about what brands are. Imagine a place in our brains for brand. This is brand equity. It is a sum of all the experiences, all the ads we have seen, and what our friends have told us. If we were to produce the perfect ad, we should make sure first to stir emotion among people, and then to store it into memory.”

For all its glorious promise, the intersection between neuroscience and business does not come without its sceptics – surprisingly, from within neuroscience itself. Padoa-Schioppa is still uncertain about whether our knowledge of neuroscience is deep enough to influence marketing. “Our understanding is limited to how the brain influences economic decisions, as opposed to why. Assume we understand the brain processes behind temporal discounting. This will not tell us much about why people prefer to pay later than sooner,” he says.

Much of his reservation boils down to the fact that neuroscience is still in its infancy. It remains to be seen just how much the realm of neuroscience, fast on its way to becoming the dominant paradigm in psychology, will shake up the way we approach business today and in the future. ww Find out how you can train your brain to achieve peak performance, by turning to page 58 to have a look at our new wellbeing column

workspacegroup.co.uk

Testing times How powerful are psychometric tests? Farah Khalique checks her personality with Central Test. “How much do I really know about myself and what I’m like at work? I know that I’m driven, I hate working in an office and I daydream a lot. I’m at my happiest point in my career now, as a freelance journalist. Self-employment suits me” So I’m curious to see what these tests can tell me about myself that I haven’t already sussed out, and what my weak spots are. They aim to provide insights into things like job preferences, personal development, working styles and how to work best with colleagues.

Central Test employs advanced devices such as “forced choice” questions to assess personality types, and the tests can even spot if you are lying in your answers. I go in with an open mind, and leave with a wealth of information that has inspired me to make some life-changing decisions.

The three tests take no more than about 45 minutes to complete on my home computer, and involve a series of questions and a spatial-awareness test. Central Test’s psychometrician, Dr Luke Montuori, who features in My Workspace on page 66, walks me through the results.

I have a strong sense of self-worth and self-acceptance, and am very independent.

I’m a free thinker, highly intuitive and work best when not bound by strict rules and regulations. Journalism is a very good fit for me. Some of the other observations are a little harder to swallow. I “may appear unconcerned about the problems of others” and “may disguise the truth to achieve a particular objective”!

The most useful insights are around my interactions with colleagues and stress reactions. The report suggests I could be more open to teamwork, and recommends I take a step back when facing conflict, instead of jumping in with my gut reaction.

The results of my spatial-awareness test are a game changer. I have always known that I am geographically challenged and, at times, a careless driver, but my below-average score is the trigger I need to make a change. Montuori recommends the Peak Brain Training mobile app, developed by neuroscientists and game experts to challenge cognitive skills.

He says, “Use it or lose it. The brain is in some ways a muscle. If you use it a lot, you will build up those skills. Stick at it, and you will improve.”

This is the year I will work on my spatial awareness and conquer my driving demons.

“Use it or lose it. The brain is in some ways a muscle. If you use it a lot, you will build up those skills”

science in sport BeeLine bling for your bike

“Stats alone aren’t always enough”

THE NUMBERS GAME Data innovation is making sports and fitness more exciting and inclusive for fans and participants.

Arthur House meets the Workspace businesses adding the magic touch to sports with illuminating statistics We all know that exercise is good for us.

One in seven people in the UK are now gym members, and that number is rising. As the fitness industry has grown in recent years, so has the popularity of digital tools that enable us to monitor our progress. Wearable tech such as a FitBit, or mobile apps like RunKeeper or Strava, can record everything from distance to speed and heart rate to calories burned, allowing runners and cyclists to compete with their friends and share their achievements on social media.

However, stats alone aren’t always enough to keep us motivated. Although 38% of New Year’s resolutions involve doing more exercise, statistics from the Fitness Industry Association show that most people who join gyms in January have quit or stopped going after 24 weeks. The UK wastes almost £600 million a year on unused gym memberships.

We may have the technology in our smartphones to track and record everything,

46

but what we also need are ways of bringing it to life. How are forward-thinking businesses using data to tell exciting stories that engage sports and fitness fans around the globe?

Gamifying fitness

“When I started out running at university I found it really boring and painful, like a lot of people,” says Adrian Hon, CEO at independent games developer Six to Start, based at Workspace’s Spectrum House in Highgate. “I was surprised that no-one had made a really good game that made running more exciting and more motivating.”

Alongside writer Naomi Alderman, Hon conceived Zombies Run, an “audio adventure” that casts you, the runner, as one of the last survivors of a zombie apocalypse.

On a typical mission (there are 250 in total), players must collect supplies and outrun zombies while immersing themselves in an unfolding story featuring dozens of characters. Meanwhile, the app tracks your distance and pace, and plays your own music in the background. With more than one million players and more than 40 million kilometres logged online, it is by far the most popular smartphone fitness game ever made.

Hon puts the success of Zombies Run down to a number of factors – including its

early launch in 2012 and the sheer quality of writing (Alderman won the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction for her novel The Power in 2017). It’s a recipe for success that seems to have been hard to emulate. “People have tried to gamify fitness for the last decade but usually it just doesn’t work. Adding points, levels and badges doesn’t actually make the act of exercise more fun,” he says, noting that fads like the Wii Fit have come and gone over the years. “It takes a lot of good content and good game design.”

Get on yer bike

As well as running, we’re often told to ditch the car or public transport and get on our bikes instead. Apart from the danger posed to cyclists in a city like London, one thing that puts people off cycling is the difficulty of navigating while on two wheels. Having to stop frequently to consult your smartphone is inconvenient, and listening to Google Maps’ audio directions in headphones risks making you less aware of your surroundings.

What if cyclists could get where they needed to safely and smoothly, while having an adventure at the same time? Workspace customer BeeLine, based at The Biscuit Factory in Bermondsey, aims to offer exactly that. The company produces

homeworkmagazine

science in sport Adrian Hon, CEO at Six to Start

“People have tried to gamify fitness for the last decade…it takes a lot of good content and good game design” a stripped-back navigation device for your bike which, rather than guiding you by strict, turn-by-turn instructions, simply shows you an arrow telling you which direction to head in and the distance to your destination. It’s up to you to choose a route. “Rather than being a passenger, you are free to explore, lift your head up and enjoy your surroundings,” says Co-founder Tom Putnam. “The idea is to make navigation more fun, and about the journey.”

There’s nothing to stop you going down a dead end, so you need to keep your eyes open. For the less adventurous, BeeLine

Hungry for data

storytelling. The company, which is based at Kennington Park, was founded in 2008 as a spin-off from Hawk-Eye, whose well-known tracking technology is now integral to tennis, football and rugby.

“Hawk-Eye collects huge amounts of data – we have 10 cameras on a tennis court,” says Richardson. “At Pulselive we’re interested in what stories we can tell with that data.” The company has operators at sports events who work closely with producers and directors to find interesting nuggets of analysis. So if you’ve ever seen John McEnroe on TV at Wimbledon discussing the placement of Federer’s first

has a setting that takes you on a prescribed route, similar to Google Maps, but it’s not necessarily quicker. Indeed, in a city like London with a high density of roads, the “exploration” setting gets people to their destination on average 10% quicker than the prescribed routes.

Putnam hopes that by making the experience of cycling more fun, the health benefits will follow. With that in mind, he has recently launched an integration with Strava so that BeeLine users can measure their progress if they want to. However, it’s more about the enjoyment. In addition, apps like CycleStreets or Happy Maps maximise the “emotional gain” of a journey by taking you via fragrant flowers or beautiful architecture.

Zombies Run: Run in the real world, become a hero in another. Which mission will you choose to accept?

serves, this is thanks to the combination of Hawk-Eye technology and Pulselive’s datastorytelling capabilities.

When it launched, Pulselive initially sought to make live sport on TV more engaging by asking fans questions that they could vote on during broadcasts. Since then it’s diversified to help the world’s biggest leagues, organisations and clubs figure out how fans use digital media and consume content, to boost engagement rates and maximise profits. The English Premier League, World Rugby, International Cricket Council and Barcelona football club are just a few of Pulselive’s customers.

For the diehard fans, Pulselive provides the tools via apps and white-label solutions such as ESPN’s Courtcast, for them to

48

For sports fans, technology and data are at the heart of the experience, from goal-line decision systems to TV analysis or fantasy league apps. One of the biggest players is Stats, whose London office is at Workspace’s Vestry Street Studios in Hackney.

Having started out 35 years ago in the US as a sports-analytics company aimed at improving team performance, Stats discovered there was a huge appetite for data among fans and broadcasters too.

The company’s clients now include Premier League clubs, Google, Alexa and Snapchat. Stats collects data on more

than 45 different sports and 600 leagues worldwide to an astonishing level of detail – to take football alone, the company records players’ location; how many times they touch the ball; how many passes they complete; and how far they run. As with fitness statistics, however, the key is using the data to tell interesting stories. Stats’s data scientists combine the data gathered to build up a picture of different playing styles – one of the company’s USPs – while their editorial research team creates bespoke reports for clients.

Wyndham Richardson, MD at Pulselive, would agree that data is nothing without

homeworkmagazine

Left: Wyndham Richardson, MD at Pulselive, Kennington Park, believes that data is nothing without storytelling

“Hawk-Eye collects huge amounts of data – we have 10 cameras on a tennis court. At Pulselive, we’re interested in what stories we can tell with that data” Wyndham Richardson, MD at Pulselive

explore the data on their own, but this only amounts to 15–20% of fans, according to Richardson. “The other 80% want to be pushed information and have a story told for them,” he says.

The future of fandom

According to Richardson, the ubiquity and growing data capacity of smartphones will mean that federations, leagues and clubs have the opportunity to go directly to the fan, rather than through a broadcaster or media partner. And instead of paying a flat rate per month to get a sports channel on TV, for example, they’ll be able to “choose a particular club or event and get a really premium experience,” says Richardson.

This in turn will enable companies to target content at individuals based on their preferences, which will add value

workspacegroup.co.uk

for commercial partners. “Look at Netflix,” says Richardson. “The whole experience is augmented to focus on content they think you’re going to like. Sport is going in this direction too.”

For Cormac Bourne, General Manager UK at Stats, the big innovation on the horizon is OTT, or over-the-top media, in other words, internet sports streaming.

Tech giants like Amazon and Facebook are already starting to get involved. Rather than simply being broadcast into someone’s home, live streaming will allow content to be personalised to the user – for example, you might be able to select which camera angles you want, chat with your friends on built-in social media, and request stats during the match.

The other game changer will be VR. Virtual reality is already being used by

some of the more advanced clubs for training purposes, but we’re not far off a time when it could be used to replicate a live-match experience. Fans could buy VR season tickets, with infinite access to the best (virtual) seats in the house. Data will be central to this, in order to relay the positions and movements of players in real time to the VR environment. Over in the fitness sector, there’s also the potential to use virtual reality at the gym. “We’re doing some research into that but it’s early days,” says Hon. Could sweaty headsets be the only thing preventing data from taking over sports completely? Let’s see what the future holds. ww Read about how virtual reality is changing the way we play mobile games on page 60

49

health

“If our gut isn’t happy, the rest of our body isn’t either – including our mind”

SHAPE UP WITH SCIENCE

We are bombarded daily with the latest fad diet, superfood or innovative workout promising “fast results in time for summer”. Is there a quick-fix, one-size-fits-all solution to achieving optimum health, or can we take a more scientific approach? Beauty and lifestyle journalist Mitra Wicks finds out how to radiate health from the inside out – without all the hot air

Be good to your gut

Perplexed about the best dietary approach?

Keeping our beloved gut happy is the long-term key to a happy and healthy life.

Nutrition and weight-loss coach Pippa Campbell explains, “What you eat can directly affect your gut bacteria, for better and for worse, and changes in your gut bacteria or microbiome can cause weight gain.” The link between weight and gut bacteria is an expanding area of research, and the links with weight are shocking.

Campbell elaborates, “Scientists know that if they insert the faeces of slim mice, which have lots of good bacteria, into obese mice, the obese mice become slim. When they insert the faeces of the obese mice into the slim mice’s guts, the slim mice become obese.”

Can gut problems be detrimental to our health in other ways? Obese people have been shown to possess a lower variety of good bacteria in their guts than people of a healthy weight, and they also have a higher incidence of gut problems. Campbell states that many symptoms can occur as a result of an unhealthy gut, such as “bloating, wind, catching colds, feeling emotionally low, sleep problems, acne, eczema, heartburn, muscle or joint problems.”

It appears that if our gut isn’t happy, the rest of our body isn’t either – including our mind, so maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle is essential for top-totoe wellness. Registered dietitian and consultant nutritionist Hala El-Shafie of Nutrition Rocks offers a simple approach.

Famed for her appearances on Channel 4’s How to Lose Weight Well and BBC 1’s Eat

50

Well for Less, El-Shafie believes the key to health is the “rainbow plate” – a vibrant dish of balanced food groups primarily made up of colourful vegetables. “The key to a healthy diet is combining fibre with a good mix of nutrients,” she says. “Simply work on ensuring that half of your plate is filled with vegetables, a quarter with complex carbs and the other quarter with lean protein.”

Probiotics and prebiotics

We’ve all heard about the merits of probiotics and prebiotics in helping to improve our gut function, but what exactly are they and how can they help us?

Probiotics are “good” bacteria that help keep the digestive system healthy by controlling the growth of bacteria that cause harm. These can be taken in supplement form or by consuming live yogurt containing lactobacillus or bifidobacterium bacteria.

Prebiotics are food for the probiotics – the more prebiotics we have, the better probiotics can do their job. Foods rich in prebiotics include asparagus, oats, legumes and bananas – a handy, office-friendly snack.

Nutritionist Cassandra Burns explains, “Our digestive tract contains trillions of bacteria – more than the total number of cells in our body. They start to colonise the gut as soon as we are born, through contact with bacteria in the birth canal and subsequently through the mother’s milk and other food and drink that is consumed.

Some are beneficial and some can be pathogenic (able to produce disease). If there is an imbalance of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria or other organisms [such as] yeasts, this is

known as dysbiosis and may be linked to some common digestive disturbances, as well as other health problems.”

It appears that a healthy diet is key to a healthy gut and that we need to ensure the correct balance of good and bad bacteria, but what exactly do the scientists think about this? A 2014 scientific study, “The impact of diet and lifestyle on gut microbiota and human health”, found that, although dietary intervention can induce significant change, it may not always be enough to engineer the changes in microbial populations that are conducive to better health. The study concludes, “The use of probiotics and other strategies may be required.”

Fitness fads or game changers?

A healthy diet is one piece of the health puzzle, but fitness is just as important.

However, with many of us stressed from high workloads and with little time to spare, we want solutions that work. DNA testing is fast becoming one of the most highly sought-after fitness assessments, with startup companies promising bespoke nutrition and fitness regimes specifically tailored to your body’s needs.

Parkhall-based Workspace customer Leanne Spencer, Founder at Bodyshot Performance, explains that DNA testing can help remove the guesswork about the type of nutrition plan that suits you and the type of exercise to which your body best responds.

She says, “Prior to this technology, you had to go through a process of trial and error, often taking weeks or months and

homeworkmagazine

“And yet AI is still big news�

Motion tracking during exercise

workspacegroup.co.uk

XX

health Below: Try your hand at Reformer Pilates

Snack on sauerkraut

Campbell’s top five tips to improve gut health 1 Eat whole, unprocessed, unrefined foods. One of the best ways to maintain gut health involves cutting out sugar and refined carbs, and jacking up gut-supporting fibre.

2 Fill your plate with vegetables and plant-based foods. Your gut bacteria will really love these high-fibre foods.

3 Go for good fats such as extra virgin olive oil.

4 Add fibre-rich foods like nuts, seeds and prebiotic foods.

5 Look for fermented foods. sauerkraut, kimchi, tempeh and miso contain good amounts of probiotics so your healthy gut bugs can be fruitful and multiply.

52

leading to frustration. Most of our DNA is predetermined, but our genes can be influenced by our environment, the food we eat, the air we breathe and the levels of stress we are under. Understanding this, and our own unique genetic make-up, means we can personalise our lifestyles to work with our genes and not against them.”

For those desiring a more bespoke, scientific approach to health and fitness, DNA testing may be the way forward, but what does it involve, and what is on offer in terms of solutions? Bodyshot Performance has created a series of products all based on the DNA test by partnering with DNAFit to offer an oral swab test that looks at 50 genes that relate to diet and fitness.

“Once we have the results, we can relate them to everything else we know about you – whether you’re vegan, for example, and your current fitness levels – and put together a personalised action plan that’s easy to follow.”

Bodyshot offers the DNA test as a standalone product, but it also includes blood testing (to be done at home using a fingerprick test) and wearable technology to track sleep and activity data.

DNA testing may be the answer for some of our problems, but other

solutions to common problems are more straightforward. Slouching over glaring computer screens and hunching over our smartphones day after day can lead to back problems, poor posture and high stress levels. A fitness routine that can help alleviate such problems is a true godsend.

Trending practices such as yoga and pilates can address both concerns – and help you end your hectic weekday with a mood-heightening boost. Back pain and stress are two of the most common health issues today, says Justin Rogers, Creative Director of Ten Health & Fitness, based at Workspace’s Barley Mow Centre in Chiswick. He says, “Ten’s trademark Dynamic Reformer Pilates is really effective against both. Not only is the workout ideal for correcting postural issues and strengthening the core, but the focus and concentration required make it an absorbing and empowering time-out from the pressure of work.”

Ten Health & Fitness has eight studios across London. Rogers says, “We keep class sizes deliberately small, so there’s plenty of personal attention and hands-on correction from the trainer. We’re able to regress or amend exercises to accommodate injuries or issues that a client may have.”

Left: Dominika Minarovic, Co-founder at Clean Beauty Co Clean Beauty is the UK’s leading natural beauty platform for the best in clean beauty news, recipes, reviews, tips and advice

Which supplement to choose?

“Consumers are seeking more natural, unprocessed ingredients in their cosmetics” Stay moisturised, naturally

In today’s toxin-bashing, clean-living society, we don’t just care about what we put into our body, we’re concerned with what we slather all over it too.

Dominika Minarovic, Co-founder of natural beauty platform Clean Beauty Co, based at The Record Hall, Workspace’s new centre in Farringdon, believes that the rise of health-aware, savvier consumers has led to an increase in “cleaner”, natural beauty products. “Consumers are seeking more natural, unprocessed ingredients in their cosmetics, which has given rise to cleaner formulations and more independent brands that aren’t held to a commercial bottom line,” she says.

Scientific studies show that fragrance and preservatives are a major cause of contact dermatitis. The preservatives to watch out for on your skincare product’s ingredients list include methylparaben, propylparaben and butylparaben. Minarovic says, “There are still many conflicting narratives around synthetic chemicals and their long-term usage effects, but it seems consumers are moving away from the conversation to natural alternatives.”

Moreover, natural brands offer environmental benefits. Mel Turkerman,

workspacegroup.co.uk

who founded organic skincare brand DermaNutri, explains the difference, “Natural brands tend to be more ethical and better for the planet, whilst being more compatible with the skin and less likely to cause reactions.”

Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the impact of skincare products on the environment. This year, the UK banned manufacturers from adding plastic microbeads from everyday personal care products like face scrubs and toothpaste.

These tiny pieces of polyethylene plastic pass through water-treatment processes and make their way into the ocean, harming marine life.

It seems that diet, fitness and skincare fads come and go, but the one factor that remains consistently important is the underlying science. As our understanding of science grows, so too does our approach to achieving optimum health from the inside out. ww

Choosing a probiotic supplement that is easy to take and contains the “right” levels of “good bacteria” can be tricky.

VSL#3 (£14.99 for a box of 10 sachets, vsl3.co.uk) contains 450 billion bacteria per sachet, including eight strains of beneficial live bacteria purposely selected, carefully cultivated and mixed proportionally to survive gastric acid, bile and pancreatic secretions.

Naturopathic nutritionist Amy Morris recommends Progurt (from £29.75, water-for-health.co.uk). “It supplies a truly significant volume of beneficial bacteria,” she says. “Every sachet contains one trillion CFU from human-derived isolates, meaning that the bacteria is uniquely isolated from humans, not cows or soil as with other supplements. It stands to reason that native strains will colonise far better than those isolated from other sources.”

“Choosing a probiotic supplement that is easy to take and contains the ‘right’ levels of ‘good bacteria’ can be tricky”

Find out how you can train your brain to achieve optimum mental wellbeing, in our new wellbeing column on page 58.

Less-Stress London brings you the latest information and top tips on how to de-stress in the city

53

health

2

1

3

4

TOP 5

HEALTHY SNACKS 1 Hazelnut-butter-topped oatcakes drizzled with Hive & Keeper (hiveandkeeper. com). This is a balanced combination of protein, slow-release carbohydrates and honey – a good prebiotic.

2 Bol Foods’ Japanese Salad Jar (bolfoods.com) is a colourful, nutrientdense powerhouse that provides two of your minimum five a day. Based at Westbourne Studios, Bol Foods’ motto is “Eat plants love life”.

3 Batch Organics’ Blueberry and Almond Butter Breakfast Bowl (batchorganics.com). This Workspace customer at Exmouth House has come up with the ultimate grab-n-go breakfast: antioxidant-rich blueberries combined with heart-health-promoting oats and protein-rich almond butter.

4 Gato & Co’s Chocolate & Aubergine Fondant (gatoandco.com). Enjoy this indulgent but healthy sweet treat made with gooey aubergine, spirulina, cacao and a touch of honey.

5 54

5 Nix and Kix’s Mango and Ginger (nixandkix.com) Bored of plain water?

This Southbank House-based Workspace company has the answer. Try a refreshing concoction of sparkling water, vitamin C-packed mango, cayenne pepper and digestion-aiding ginger.

homeworkmagazine

MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR MEETINGS “Great space, brilliant service and we won a substantial piece of business there and then, the client was really impressed, all worked seamlessly.”

John Graham, adcreative

Instant Access, Anywhere We pride ourselves on our huge range of high-spec meeting rooms across London. You can book any of these by the hour and you don’t even need to be a customer to do so.

Tech City

Battleship, Fleet Street, Blackfriars

Our rooms are kitted out with the latest technology, including business grade Wi-Fi, 44˝ LED screens as a minimum and many have ClickShare, a wireless presentation tool.

Stay Fuelled We’ve got award winning cafés and restaurants on-site, to keep you and your team fully functional.

Jim, Grand Union Studios, Ladbroke Grove

We’ve teamed up with Excell to offer technical support on speed dial for all meeting room bookings

There are over 75 meeting rooms featured on our site for you to browse and book instantly, visit

workspace.co.uk/meeting-rooms

Workspace Book Corner We asked five customers which science books inspired them and helped them to find success in business.

Here are their top recommendations

Gavin Heavyside CTO at MyDrive, The Leather Market “When I look back, a book that still stands out is A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, which I read in my early teens.

It opened my eyes to the quantum world in a very accessible way, especially the bizarre yet fascinating behaviours at subatomic scale that can’t be explained by classical physics, but govern the behaviour of things we use every day.

The underlying laws of the real world can be as strange and inexplicable as science fiction to those who haven’t studied physics.”

Was there a beginning of time?

Could time run backwards?

Is the universe infinite or does it have boundaries? These are just some of the questions considered in an internationally acclaimed masterpiece by one of the world’s greatest thinkers.

It begins by reviewing the great theories of the cosmos from Newton to Einstein, before delving into the secrets that still lie at the heart of space and time, from the Big Bang to black holes, via spiral galaxies and string theory. To this day, A Brief History of Time remains a staple of the scientific canon, and its succinct and clear language continues to introduce millions to the universe and its wonders.

homeworkmagazine

business books

Heather Andrew CEO at Neuro-Insight, Metal Box Factory “It talks about how emotions guide behaviour and decision-making, and was one of the first things that got me interested in the benefits of looking at subconscious rather than claimed behaviour in understanding people’s motivations and behaviour.”

In the centuries since Descartes famously proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am”, science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being.

Even modern neuroscience has tended until recently to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error. Antonio Damasio challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wonderfully engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behaviour.

Wyndham Richardson

Charlotte Spokes

MD and Co-founder at Pulselive, Kennington Park

Founder at My Friend Charlie, The Print Rooms

“It speaks to the fact that increasingly people are spending their lives glued to a screen. Technology’s brilliant, but we need breaks from it to think about life. It’s about knowing when to switch off.

I attempt to live by it.”

“I read it when I was studying osteopathy and it significantly changed my opinion of clinical trials and their relevance.

Covering topics from faddy health trends (‘clean eating’ springs to mind currently) to worrying statistics surrounding medical trials, Goldacre pulls apart the information we receive via the media, so-called ‘experts’ and pharmaceutical companies, and shows the importance of critical thinking rather than believing everything we see, read or hear.”

Powers argues that we need a new philosophy for life with screens.

To find it, he reaches into the past, uncovering a rich trove of ideas that have helped people manage and enjoy their connected lives for thousands of years. Drawing on some of history’s most brilliant thinkers, from Plato to Shakespeare to Thoreau, he shows that digital connectedness serves us best when it’s balanced by its opposite, disconnectedness. Using his own life as both laboratory and object lesson, Powers demonstrates why this is the moment to revisit our relationship with screens and mobile technologies, and how profound the rewards of doing so can be. Lively, original and entertaining, Hamlet’s BlackBerry will challenge you to rethink your digital life.

“Hamlet’s BlackBerry will challenge you to rethink your digital life” workspacegroup.co.uk

Since 2003, Dr Ben Goldacre has been exposing dodgy medical data in his popular Guardian column. In this book he takes on the MMR hoax and misleading cosmetics ads, vitamins and mankind’s vexed relationship with all manner of “toxins”. The selfconfessed “Johnny Ball cum Witchfinder General” performs a successful detox on a Barbie doll, sees his dead cat become a certified nutritionist and probes the supposed medical qualifications of “Dr” Gillian McKeith. Full of spleen and satire, Goldacre takes us on a hilarious, invigorating and ultimately alarming journey through the bad science we are fed daily by hacks and quacks.

Adrian Hon CEO and Co-founder at Six to Start, Spectrum House “Despite being 12 years old, this book still has one of the best depictions of the future that I’ve ever read. It doesn’t have a great plot but the descriptions of social media, technology and gaming are just fantastic.”

Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer’s patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world-renowned poet; now he is 75 years old – although by a medical miracle he looks much younger – and he’s starting over, unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son’s family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age, although the new world is available only if, like his teenage granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access (through nodes designed into smart clothes) and to see the digital context through smart contact lenses. However, when Gu begins to retrain at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination.

57

wellbeing

“We help clients remember what normal feels like�

Find your inner peace

James Roy, Technical Director at Brainworks

58

homeworkmagazine

the power of

Welcome to our new regular column on wellbeing, bringing you the latest information on how to maintain a healthy work-life balance

By James Langton, Editor at Less-Stress London When did you last breeze through the day, managing stressful situations and difficult people like a seasoned plate spinner? Most of us have a fairly decent hit rate, but can the science of wellbeing help us surf rather than swim tirelessly toward our goal horizons?

Many who train for marathons find they can train their brain as well as their body to achieve peak performance.

Brainworks is London’s leading neurofeedback and brain-training clinic.

Technical Director James Roy says, “Professionals either come to us because they are locked into the classic stress symptoms of sleeplessness, anxiety and subsequent loss of concentration, or because they want to train their mind to consistently perform at peak.”

The starting point is a rigorous assessment and a brain-mapping session. The Brainworks team then use sensors and video imagery to devise a bespoke programme that retrains the neurotransmitters towards a calmer response to stressful situations.

Roy says, “We help clients remember what normal feels like – a calm baseline to work from. We can then train them to improve focus and concentration, helping to achieve enhanced performance and productivity.”

A state of mental wellbeing allows for a calm mind – the best starting point for positive decision-making in terms of lifestyle and health choices – and the links between a calm mind and enhanced cognition are well researched. Wouldn’t it be great to have a meditation studio where you could drop in and calm the mind?

Inhere Meditation offers just such a haven, based at The Light Centre by

workspacegroup.co.uk

Monument. It offers seven different focus sessions, depending on the state of mind you’d like to achieve, and you can meditate for anywhere from five to 40 minutes.

If you are a regular meditator ready to deepen your practice, consider the benefits of flotation therapy. This works on the principle of restricted environmental stimulation to achieve a sensation of weightlessness, by floating in a warm, dimly lit bath or pod of Epsom salts. This is the perfect environment in which to temporarily let go of the body and luxuriate in the power of the mind.

Finally, nutrition is a key factor to consider if you’re serious about achieving optimum performance. Food for the Brain is a charity dedicated to studying the link between what we eat and how we think. It is behind The Brain Bio Centre in Putney, which tests for biochemical or physiological imbalances that can affect mood and wellbeing. Specialists at the centre can then devise a personal nutritional roadmap.

We’re all different; one person’s stress is another’s drive for success, so it’s important to do your research to find out what could offer the best solution for your particular situation and lifestyle. Personal recommendations and reviews are useful, but ultimately, trying something yourself is usually the best way to judge if a treatment, therapy or fitness path is right for you. ww Less-Stress London is a directory of health and wellbeing services for Londoners. It provides information about the mind and body and where to grab a good, healthy lunch. Browse less-stress.london for upcoming events and a carefully curated collection of professional bodies, wellbeing clinics, therapists and practitioners

Unwind at Inhere Meditation

BRAIN TRAINING

Take a minute Explore these options to see how they could help you clear the mental fog JUST BREATHE LONDON Social meditation groups justbreatheproject.com FLOATWORKS Flotation therapy centre floatworks.com THE SLEEP SCHOOL Drug-free insomnia workshops and clinics thesleepschool.org BIOLAB Nutritional and environmental science lab based at The Light Box biolab.co.uk BRITISH ASSOCIATION OF ANGER MANAGEMENT (BAAM) angermanage.co.uk

Find out how tapping into the inner workings of the brain can help you hire the right people and improve your customer offering in our feature on page 34

59

mobile gaming

on game

Mobile phone games, are they good or bad for us? Supporters and sceptics are locked in a fierce debate, but whether you like them or loathe them, they are hugely popular. Editor Farah Khalique uncovers the science behind gaming and meets the developers who are crafting the cutting-edge games that we’ll be playing tomorrow We love playing games on our phones – on the tube to work; waiting at the doctor’s surgery; in line at the supermarket; even (for some people) on the loo. We simply can’t get enough of them, as proved by figures published by gaming-intelligence provider, SuperData. Last year games generated almost $60 billion in revenues – a third more than in 2016 – and come 2020, mobile phone games will make up more than half the total games market. Our days of patiently playing quaint games like Echo the Dolphin on a home console are well and truly over.

Mobile mania

What is it that makes us find mobile phone games so exhilarating? The answer can be found in the deepest recesses of our minds, says Dr Zaheer Hussain, a psychologist at University of Derby who specialises in technology use, social media and behavioural addictions. A member of the

60

International Gaming Research Unit, he describes how mobile phone games spark up the pleasure system of the brain, releasing the feel-good chemical dopamine.

From the moment a player presses on a game app, they are introduced to a plethora of visual and auditory stimuli, like brightly coloured sweets in Candy Crush or squawking eagles in Angry Birds.

Hussain says, “When you play such a game and hear a sound, that is the stimulus and you respond to it. To begin with, you get a reward for your actions, but as the game gets more difficult, there is an extended time period between the stimulus and the response of the feedback loop. You still get that dopamine hit, but the time between your behaviour and the reward increases as a way of trying to lure you in, and keep you attracted to the game.”

The secret to success lies in making the game as fun and addictive as possible,

says Jack Tang, Founder of Funky Panda Games, a mobile gaming start-up based at Workspace’s Kennington Park. It won early success with its first dark fantasy game, Monster Mountain, which was awarded Best Role-Playing Game at the TIGA Games Industry Awards in 2016. Now the team is working on a sequel, as well as new games Stardust Battle and Tap Jumpers.

Tang says, “I think what is behind [the rise of] mobile games is that people want to kill time. So it has to be fun, and you have to create enough fun for a short amount of time. If a player only has limited amount of time – maybe they are on the bus – they want to play for five or 10 minutes, so each game play has to be short enough so they can finish.”

Smartphone addiction

There is no denying the popularity of mobile games, with the likes of battle game Clash

homeworkmagazine

Discover Monster Mountain, an enchanting world of dark fantasy

“Mobile phone games spark up the ‘pleasure system’ of the brain”

Royale able to rake in more than a billion dollars last year. However, mobile phones and gaming have also attracted criticism.

Two of Apple’s biggest investors voiced their growing concern about smartphone addiction in an open letter, and the World Health Organization (WHO) will list gaming addiction as a mental-health condition in 2018. Are these games actually bad for us?

WHO characterises gaming addiction as “a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour”, which includes diminishing control over how much time is spent playing games, prioritising it above other important things and being unable to stop playing even when it has bad consequences.

Research has shown that staring at screens close up for too long is bad for our eyes. A study from King’s College London found that rising rates of short-sightedness are not down to natural ageing, but rather too much time spent staring at screens and not enough time in natural daylight. Severe myopia is linked to serious eye conditions

workspacegroup.co.uk

like glaucoma and retinal detachment.

The authors called for more research on the impact of the rapid rise in computers, tablets and mobile phones on visual development in children.

So should we tear ourselves away from our screens? The answer is not clearcut. Supporters point to scientific studies of gamers that show enhanced activity in the brain stem – to be exact, in the inferior parietal lobule, left posterior cerebellum and the left middle frontal gyrus. These three areas of the brain are related to our sensory motor co-ordination.

Hussain says, “These areas light up in gamers; one of the positive aspects of these activities is that it can improve your hand-eye co-ordination in problem-solving activities. Also, some people find that games can help them improve their memory. They may know where certain items are in a game such as a fantasy game, so they know where to go next time when they fail.”

Mobile games will also often have forums attached to them, where players can

Above: A character from Stardust Battle, a new game coming from Funky Panda Games Below: Buzz Lightyear, to the rescue!

Left: AR bringing a book to life, The Boy with His Head Stuck in a Book Below left: The Zappar crew at Barley Mow Business Centre Below: Funky Panda Games designs a character for its new game, Stardust Battle

“A pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour”

WHO definition of gaming addiction

chat and exchange knowledge, helping each other to complete levels. This online social interaction allows people to find and nurture a community with fellow gamers.

Make education fun

Progressive developers are adopting cutting-edge technology like augmented reality (AR) to make learning a more fun experience for children, bringing an element of gaming to education. Workspace customer Zappar, based at Barley Mow in Chiswick, is a pioneer in this field. Zappar creates augmented-reality experiences for businesses including Shazam and BMW, as well as schools and colleges.

Partnerships and Marketing Director, Max Dawes, says, “Augmented reality and education go hand in hand. AR not only

62

fosters learning in children, it also engages the mind differently to normal teaching methodology. Learning by doing is a key factor here that AR facilitates.”

Zappar’s lead designer, Anna Broadhurst, recently created a book called The Boy with His Head Stuck in a Book, for children who are not engaged with reading but love technology like mobile phones.

Dawes says, “The digital content within the pages adds an additional layer to the story itself, merging physical content with digital interactivity. It’s that wow moment in boardrooms, classrooms, events or conferences when users see images come to life, words jump off a page, or a 3D object or character come to life in front of their eyes.”

Mobile-phone gaming may be causing alarm in some circles, but in fact it is just

one element of an ever-changing world.

Augmented-reality, virtual-reality and mixed-reality devices are the newest frontier in gaming.

Tang at Funky Panda Games says, “They will not replace mobile phones because people still want to make calls and there are battery limitations right now, but soon we should see augmented-reality and virtual-reality devices as an extension of the phone. This is the next big thing for all game makers.” ww What do you think about mobile gaming? Whip out your mobile and share your thoughts on Twitter, using #homeworkmag – and remember to tag @WorkspaceGroup

homeworkmagazine

Below (from top): Fight to the death on award-winning game, Monster Mountain; Stardust Battle, a new game from Funky Panda Games; listen to your elders on Monster Mountain

Try your hand at being a graffiti artist with My Friend Charlie

The science of love Is there a scientific formula for love?

Online matchmaker eHarmony claims there is – and has built an entire business around it. The Advertising Standards Authority, however, ruled not when it banned eHarmony’s London Underground billboard ad: “Step aside, fate. It’s time science had a go at love.”

The company defended its “compatibilitymatching algorithm” that matches users on its website, but fate won the day.

Online and mobile dating services like eHarmony dominate the search for love, but the gamification of popular dating apps like Tinder has attracted criticism that it makes it harder to find true love.

Tinder Co-founder Sean Rad has admitted that he created it as a more of a game than a genuine dating app.

Club Workspace customer My Friend Charlie takes an old-school approach to

dating – and it’s working. The offline dating platform, run by Charlie Spokes at The Print Rooms, puts on paid dating events for Londoners in their 30s and 40s – everything from wine tasting to axe throwing and graffiti tours.

Charlie says, “A lot of dating apps focus on superficial transactional relationships. With My Friend Charlie, you meet someone you’ve already got something in common with – it’s a more meaningful match. Plus it’s not like a date with one person; you go out with a group of like-minded people.”

Charlie says that about 70% of events result in people going on at least a first date, and she is expanding the number of monthly events to meet growing demand.

They say you can’t buy love, but you can buy a fun night out and leave the rest up to fate.

“A lot of dating apps focus on superficial transactional relationships” Charlotte Spokes, Director at My Friend Charlie workspacegroup.co.uk

63

the workspace advantage

What does The Workspace Advantage mean for you? We asked some of our customers and this is what they had to say...

At Workspace, we believe that every business should be given the opportunity to thrive. This is why our business centres are home to some of the most inspiring startups, entrepreneurs, growing and established businesses in the capital.

The Workspace Advantage helps to give them the edge We don’t see ourselves as simply a business centre provider; we create buzzing communities with super-fast technologies at their core. The Workspace Advantage stands for exactly this. It shines a light on what makes our spaces more than just four walls, and enables our customers to perform at their very best.

The Workspace Advantage has three core features: #WiredDifferently helps set us apart from the rest. As well as super-fast 10Gbps broadband and buildingwide Wi-Fi, we aim to create spaces that inspire and promote positive energy.

Workspace’s award-winning connectivity enables our unique customers to think and move fast. #SuperConnected means that we encourage our customers to connect and collaborate with a raft of equally innovative, ambitious businesses. Communal breakout areas and networking events foster a sense of community, helping you to build connections and working relationships.

64

#NoLimits #NoLimits is our belief that you should be given every opportunity to reach your true potential, so we don’t put limits on the type or flexibility of the space you need.

platform, based at The Record Hall (see page 53). “The best bit is definitely its proximity to Leather Lane, though... the food choices are amazing!”

We always want to hear your success stories and find out how we’re helping to make this happen. This is why we’ve asked some of our customers what The Workspace Advantage means to them.

Igloo Vision

Tom Putnam BeeLine

“The Biscuit Factory is spot on for us,” says Tom Putnam, Co-founder at BeeLine. “It’s a space we can put our mark on and make our own, but without having to worry about the boring things like maintenance, utilities and such.”

The brains behind smart handlebarmounted devices, BeeLine makes getting from A to B on your bike that bit easier (see page 46). And as business picks up pace, Putnam looks to the future. “It’s great to be surrounded by so many other energetic young companies and good to know that as we grow, we’ll be able to move to a bigger space within The Biscuit Factory.”

Elsie Rutterford Clean Beauty Co

“We love the Workspace environment.

It’s a hugely collaborative working space and feels like a mini community, but with the advantage of having our own dedicated space and studio,” says Elsie Rutterford, Co-founder at the UK’s leading beauty

Jessica Cooper Igloo Vision, based at Parma House in Wood Green, is a world leader in 360 degree and VR immersive projection systems (see page 32). Its large installations accommodate anything from five to 750 people. “We need a big flexible space to design and develop new tech that keeps us ahead of the curve, and Workspace allows us to do just this,” says Business Development Executive Jessica Cooper.

“We’ve been able to grow and establish our London presence,” explains Cooper.

“And with its great links to London, we can host demos for people from all over the city. The renovation of The Chocolate Factory’s café next door also makes for a great spot to take clients for lunch and have internal meetings.” ww Are you eager to be part of a buzzing community? Here at Workspace we pride ourselves on bringing people together. Our dynamic and stimulating workspaces provide the perfect networking opportunities and space for businesses to flourish.

Find out more about what Workspace can offer by visiting workspace.co.uk/advantage

homeworkmagazine

Clockwise from top: Jessica Cooper, Tom Putnam, Elsie Rutterford

“ We love the Workspace environment.

It’s a hugely collaborative working space and feels like a mini community”

Elsie Rutterford, Co-founder at Clean Beauty Co

my workspace

Dr Luke Montuori Central Test Dr Luke Montuori is a psychometrician with a PhD in psychology at Central Test, based in Kennington Park. Central Test offers innovative personality tests and state-of-the-art training to organisations looking to understand their employees on a deeper level. We asked Dr Montuori about what drew him to the field of psychometrics, his favourite places in London to let his hair down and his go-to lunch spot near Kennington Park Favourite scientist?

I’d be betraying my academic roots if I didn’t say B.F. Skinner [American psychologist, behaviourist, author, inventor and social philosopher].

What does a psychometrician do?

Psychometricians created the personality test you had to do as part of your job application, they monitor the tests used in schools and universities to make sure questions are fair, relevant and informative, and devise new ways of measuring the human experience.

What do you love about your work?

I get bored doing the same thing over and over, but this work is incredibly varied.

How do you get into work?

I’m one of the lucky ones – I get to walk into work every morning. And no, I’m not sorry.

Office view you’d kill to have?

An unimpeded view of the Shard – it’d be hard to top that.

Go-to lunch spot near Kennington Park?

The Fentiman Arms. I’m a big fan of a Friday pub lunch, especially in summer.

What’s your favourite thing about Kennington Park?

I find the building to be really visually appealing, and it’s nice to work in an environment like that. I also think there’s always a bit of a buzz, with lots of people working in really interesting companies, so it’s just a great atmosphere to come into every day. Café Mimosa’s parties are pretty good too.

Best place to let your hair down in London?

Southbank – there’s always something interesting going on, lots of good food, and it has my favourite views of London. I love to hang out there.

Where do you tend to chill/brainstorm in Kennington?

I find The Park [a lounge area on the first floor] to be the best place to have informal meetings outside of the office, but apparently I’m not the only one. Sometimes you’re lucky to get a seat there!

What skill would you like to master?

Making better jokes.

Worst work habit?

Opening more browser tabs than either I or my computer can handle.

If you could turn any activity into an Olympic sport, in which field what would you have a good chance at winning a medal?

Making bad jokes.

Favourite place to work out?

Camberwell swimming pool. Its architecture and big windowed ceiling make my swims that much more enjoyable. Either that, or the new ultra-modern pool at The Castle Centre [in Elephant & Castle].

How do you relax after a hard day at work?

I love to cook, but often it’s hard to find the time after work.

Favourite app?

The Headspace mindfulness app. I find it really useful to get myself in the right mindset for work in the morning, or for winding down in the evening.

Home is...

Sydney.

Read more about how Luke uses psychometric testing to help clients on page 45

“We devise new ways of measuring the human experience” 66

homeworkmagazine

a d k …

… a table that works really hard. So we called ours, ‘Worktable’.

Rawside Furniture is a London-based, designer, builder and lover of the most practical office furniture on planet Earth. www.rawside.co ~ hello@rawside.co ~

@rawside

Rawside, The Undercroft, Kennington Park, 1-3 Brixton Road, London, SW9 6DE

“ Use it or lose it. The brain is in some ways a muscle. If you use it a lot, you will build up those skills�

Dr Luke Montuori, Central Test