How to design a creative/inspirational workplace?
I often change the spaces that I work in. In Zambia, I re-designed the UNICEF library so the tables where in a hexagonal shape, the tables didn’t touch in the middle so I placed a tall plant on a stand. Thus encouraging quiet interaction between people, maintaining privacy and making the space feel more alive. Then, I initiated regularly changing all the display boards, so that they were colourful and informative for both the workers and visitors. Hardly radical change, but as a 17 year old intern, I was surprised that the library staff didn’t consider making the space an attractive, stimulating to be a component on what they did?
Clearly other people spend a lot of time thinking about the design of their workplaces, others spend years tweaking and adapting their spaces. Last night a friend recounted an advertising agency that has an “ideas floors” with a fridge full or coronas, sofa, a constant supply of croissants, and rooms for specific elements of advertising like “the essence room”. Hearing this reminded me of Happy Computers were the main space for a training organisation is really colourful with sofas, little tables, plenty of juice, biscuits, there are bowls full of sweets, ice-creams. It must be working because in 2007 they were ranked in the top ten for best workplaces in the UK by The Great Place to Work Institute .
There are obvious components of what make a space work: good lighting, comfortable size, the right furniture. Then there is the element that is particular to the people that use the space… quite clear comparing the room that George Bernard Shaw wrote in compared to Eric Hobsbawm’s. Quite a lot of the writers highlight that it is a private space that they can do what they ‘bloody like in it’ (Simon Gray).
Since my days at UNICEF, I have gone on to change most of the places that I have worked in. In my last house this is the space I made for my work Room in Leyton. Now, being back in Hackney, I am faced with a room that for some reason is quite challenging: the “living room”. We don’t live in it, we hang out in the kitchen, and thus the “living room” hasn’t really got a function especially not during the day. The TV is seldom used, nor is the piano, the music is turned up so that we can hear it in the kitchen. A year ago when I lived here, we were a creative bunch: a journalist, an urban planner/regenerationist and me. Two of us were doing a course in technical drawing, so I thought about having a draughtsmans table, using the walls to display articles, explore ideas, photos that we had recently taken. Now, given that two of the three of us are self-employed and freelances, maybe we could add a new function of using it as a workplace.
As a designer, I try to understand what makes peoples want to inhabit and appropriate the space. Sometimes you pick up it up in conversation. At others something catches your eye. So, this space that is sometimes used to work it, but could it be the future workspace? This is the defunct sitting space.
The question still remains, of how we can re-design the rooms combine the function of using it as a workspace and as a living room, but one that we actually work and live in. All suggestions welcome.