Events

The transdisciplinary workplace research (TWR) network welcomes both academic and professional researchers to submit their abstracts for presentation at her bi-annual conferences on work environment research. Our conferences aim to bring together work environment researchers from all relevant disciplines, both from academia and from practice.

Next conference

TWR2026 will take place in September in Zürich, Switzerland, chaired by Lukas Windlinger from ZHAW. More information will follow later.

Topics of our conferences include, but are not limited to:

• Physical work environment (e.g. real estate, architecture and design, building physics (HVCSE), bio-technology, etc.),
• Social work environment (e.g. human resource management, behavioral sciences, organizational science, business, health, environmental psychology, sociology, ethnography, etc.),
• Digital work environment (e.g. ICT, IoT, virtual and augmented reality, engineering, etc.), and
• Management of work environment (e.g. management, economics, facilities management, corporate real estate management, etc.).

Abstracts/short papers can focus on issues at an individual, organizational or urban scale.

The conferences provide delegates insight in both current topics and future interests. During 2-3 days of parallel sessions, research findings from many different perspectives are discussed with the audience of researchers and practitioners from around the world. Presenters in the regular parallel sessions (20-30 minutes/paper) have to submit a short paper (max 3500 words, excluding references). For those without a short paper (or with insufficient depth to pass our review procedure) we offer 5-minute presentations, based on abstract-only submissions. The short papers are reviewed by our scientific committee, the abstract-only submissions by the local organising team. All short papers are published in proceedings made available at the conference and open source online on this website.

Besides parallel sessions, the conferences also provide the opportunity to discuss further enhancement of the field in special sessions/workshops aimed at jointly identifying future roadmaps for related sub-themes. These sessions will provide the opportunity for participants to develop transdisciplinary, international research initiatives. Also, pre- and/or post-conference excursions are organised for participants to visit local innovative workplaces, and an attractive social program is available for further networking.

Past conferences

• TWR2024 in Edinburgh (4-7 September). For more information, see https://twr2024.org/.
• TWR 2022 in Milan (7-10 September)
• TWR 2020 hybrid in Frankfurt and online (16-19 September)
• TWR2018 in Tampere, Finland (19-21 September)

Workplace topics

TWR encourages both transdisciplinary and monodisciplinary workplace research that extends theories and/or improves practices. It can be fundamental scientific research or applied research. A list of possible topics that are likely to be discussed at TWR conferences includes, but is not limited to:

Social issues, such as:

• Safety, health, and wellbeing
• Productivity
• Hybrid working
• Workplace culture and leadership
• Work patterns and activities
• Interaction and/or concentration
• The future of knowledge work
• Privacy
• Activity Based/New Ways of Working

Technology issues, such as:

• Telecommuting
• Virtual offices
• Smart building technology
• Workplace sensors
• Mobile working

Physical issues, such as:

• Ergonomics
• Building physics
• Biophilia
• Office space quality
• Flexibility
• Collaborative spaces

Management issues, such as:

• Workplace Key Performance indicators
• Managing workplace support processes
• Sustainable workplace
• Distributed workplaces
• Co-working spaces
• Effectiveness and efficiency
• Strategic workplace management
• The sharing economy
• Workplace and employer branding