Is seating really important?
Seating is important in many ways for example “It can affect who talks to whom and have an influence on who will play leadership roles”, (Charles H Zastrow , 2008). This example reinforces the importance of seating in terms of the way seating is arranged. But seating furniture such as canteen furniture needs to fit certain criteria.
Continuing with the canteen furniture as an example criteria that needs to be fulfilled include; resistance to spilled drinks, sturdy and resistant to food spillages. So using these criteria the seating type could be plastic as these are easily cleaned also glossed wood furniture would be ideal as this can be cleaned easily if food is dropped onto it.
The following will show different types of seating environments and criteria that could affect an organisations decision to purchase:
Conference Seating – need to be hardwearing as conferences are a common event within organisations. They need to be comfortable as meetings can in some cases last hours, and comfortable seats will reduce people involved from having decreased concentration. Conference seating can also match the deco of the room to enhance the feeling of the room in terms of professionalism.
Reception Seating – can have varied criteria depending on the organisation type. For example a school reception would purchase seating that met basic requirements such as; reasonable comfort and standard design. This is because schools generally don’t have alot of capital to spend on high quality designer chairs as only students and parents would generally use the reception seating thus they only need to meet basic requirements. This would differ in comparison to a solicitor’s reception as they want to set a good first impression and aesthetics in the reception room is one of the first things a person may gain an impression from.
Operator Seating – are used by people when carrying out general duties required by their job role. This could be; general administration work, call centre work and architecture designing. So what this tells us is that the criteria depend on the job that will be conducted by the worker. For example; someone who works for hours at a computer screen need seating that is ergonomically designed so that they don’t sustain injuries associated with prolonged use of computers.
References
Charles H Zastrow , 2008. Social Work with Groups: A Comprehensive Workbook, P343
