R etrofit and repurpose Appearing in tandem with the rise of
popular through better features and facilities. For example, maker spaces and workshops are a form of third place that allows community members to work on multi-day or week projects, whether it’s woodworking, pottery or other creative outlets. Lockers can be used for tool libraries, letting multiple people access craft tools for their projects. This can be taken one step further, to create libraries that cater to whole cities by providing rentable tools. Or lockers can be used for project storage, giving makers a place to safely keep their creations. Likewise, community centres, youth centres and libraries can all provide new activities using access-controlled lockers and cabinets. Providing secure lockers for children and teenagers to store their school bags, sports equipment, or personal items helps maintain order and prevent loss. And convenient access control can help music studios, rehearsal rooms, and video editing suites provide shared access to costly equipment. By using locker locks to add services and activities, third places like these can hope to attract more people. F orm follows function The design and redesign of new and retrofitted spaces is informed by the function of the space. What offices, libraries or destination spaces feel like is constrained by what those spaces can do, and what people do in them. Users will have the most positive experiences in attractive, popular and sustainable spaces. Access control for lockers and cabinets can provide the necessary functionality for the design of attractive environments. Whether retrofitting for sustainability or designing vibrant, flexible destination spaces, locker locks and cabinet access solutions help transform how people interact with their environments. From empowering third places to enabling hybrid working, these systems bring functionality, convenience, and efficiency to modern life. Explore the possibilities at KitLock.
destination spaces, is a mounting demand for sustainability across the built environment. This is one of the highest-emitting sectors, due to the energy used for heating and cooling buildings, and because of the emissions produced during construction and the manufacturing of materials. Emissions, materials and energy consumption are now often front of mind when creating spaces. Against this backdrop, and with decades- low occupancy rates for office buildings, it’s unsurprising that many commercial spaces are being refitted, retrofitted and reused. In fact, according to research quoted in the UK Green Building Council Delivering Net Zero report, the rate of commercial building stock repurposing needs to increase to around 5% annually to meet net zero. That means at least doubling the rate seen in the UK over the last 10 years. Modern access-control solutions are increasingly retrofit-friendly, being modular, wireless, and incredibly power-efficient. For example, rather than replacing entire locker units or even arrays, many lockers can be easily retrofitted with modern locker locks, preventing waste while also upgrading the lockers’ functionality. For large commercial buildings, reusing materials can add up. It can reduce the demand for virgin materials and the energy- intensive processes associated with their extraction, manufacturing, and transportation. This also makes the embodied carbon – the emissions that went into the materials and construction process to make a product – of any retrofitted lockers drastically lower. S hared - use applications for ‘ third places ’ Over many years, due to a multitude of overlapping factors, there’s been a decline in the use of spaces which are neither work nor home. These ‘third places’ are important for enabling people to live full, flourishing lives. And, as many have discovered with the growing popularity of home working in the last half-decade, they provide an environment to relax, de-stress and socialise, free of home or work obligations. Such environments can be enhanced with lockers in several ways, helping to make them
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