The design of the workplace affects most of us, day by day, and its evolution across the centuries tells a compelling story about the types of work ongoing within these environments. As our economy shifts further away from industrial and towards knowledge, Tom Weaver asks whether we are going full circle back towards workplace ideals of the merchant class in the middle ages, and looks forward at the changes that policy, technology and culture will bring on workplaces around the world. Drawing on his research into work environments for Nomad Property, his new venture into commercial real estate, Tom will demonstrate how companies can become more effective through forecasting and considering these issues, and considers what implication this has for other types of environments, such as universities and schools.

A decade after the dawn of the information revolution, the learning space of new schools continue to be designed in the old, time-honoured ways. Part of the problem is a lack of reference points for how to design for new generations of learners: concepts like personalisation can confuse and cloud the issue as much as inspire change. Tom Weaver considers the needs of the digitial native and creates a step by step understanding of how to design 21st century learning space.

Based on his recent Thinkpiece, Tom Weaver asks: what if we could build schools in a much more cost efficient way, making them highly adaptive to change, supporting our learners and staff better pastorally, and could be a closer part of our community? Perhaps the opportunity of the credit crunch is to make some radical changes in how we think about building new schools. Tom looks at how to practically make it happen.

The humble science lab has changed little in the century and a half since Faraday himself taught, despite the advent of technology and a greatly evolved understanding of how we learn. With over £40bn being spent on new schools through Building Schools for the Future, the DCSF asked three teams to work with two schools each to reinvent science departments. As the Project Manager and Lead Consultant of the DEGW Project Faraday team, Tom Weaver was at the cutting edge of a design process that started from the basis of how science was learned, pedagogies, and created learning settings to best support that, instead of sticking with the paradigm that science could only be taught in a traditional laboratory. In this talk, Tom speaks about the briefing and design process that any school, Local Authority or company within the BSF sector could learn from.