Posts Tagged Creative Spaces
Packing ‘em in – today’s open plan means shrinking space
Telegraph newsroom photo by victoriapeckham on flickr
I’ve been ranting about Creative Spaces, open plan and working-where-you-work-best for a couple of years now (examples here, here and here).
I stumbled on a piece in the Wall Street Journal today which reported that the average new workstation designed by global architecture firm HOK Group has shrunk from 64 sq ft to 48 in the last five years.
It does make sense in these cash strapped and cautious times to try and fit more people into less space – and if you subscribe to google’s philosophy that information flows fastest amongst knowledge workers when you pack them in, the news that the average height of desk partitions has shrunk from 5ft to less than 4ft in the same period will not surprise you.
To my mind, there’s something rather depressing about seeing a room full of Dilbert style cubicles – or equally a corridor of closed office doors. Neither really inspires its occupants to great collaboration and creativity, but the properly open plan model is imperfect too.
Right now, I’m sitting in my very open plan office without desk, wall or any other kind of dividers. It’s a fairly quiet afternoon here, but I’m still trying to tune out four rather loud telephone conversations and two meetings within immediate earshot and if I look up from my screen I’m close enough to the co-worker opposite me to use her watch for timekeeping.
I’ve also got a funny feeling that I’m going to be catching her cold in the not too distant future. According to research released in January 09, the extra noise and a lack of personal space in an open plan environment leads to “shocking” effects on our physical and mental health and makes us less productive.
There must be a happy medium – but I think its some kind of complicated balancing act / trade off between structure, privacy and personal space, vs. communication, collaboration and creativity.
Add comment 7 December, 2009
creative environment or can’t be arsed?
One thing that has annoyed me about every single agency I’ve worked for is that the office has looked like a cross between a teenager’s bedroom and an explosion in a paper factory.
No matter how smart or scruffy the actual building and furnishings were, it was still a bombsite. I’ve been to lots of my colleague’s homes and they don’t exactly live in pigsties, so why do so many agency types take no pride in their workplace?
We probably spend more of our waking hours in the office than in our own homes in an average week and yet many of us chose to squat in squalor 9-5. It’s just depressing – and it doesn’t say much to clients about how much pride we take in our work. Perhaps it’s supposed to be a sign of the crazy, funky, innovative, creative environment, or maybe it’s that no-one can be arsed to tidy up.
image by hugh at gapingvoid, CC applies
I think the rot must have set in around the time that desktop computers and photocopiers arrived. It was suddenly easy to generate huge quantities of paper and at the same time dispensed with the need for so many secretaries, who practically had ‘tidy and organised’ in their job descriptions.
Add to that the move to open plan offices with minimal storage facilities and I suppose being buried under three year old research reports and foam boards of pitches lost long ago was inevitable.
My current agency is very keen on moving desks a lot as departments expand and contract, which should have kept the mess down as everyone was forced to have a clearout each time they moved. In reality, it just created the Cupboards That Time Forgot, full of important looking stuff that no-one will claim responsibility for.
I know there is a school of thought that messy = busy = good. In these sober times, perhaps it really is all about appearances.
2 comments 17 April, 2009
Open plan vs. open to distractions
archive image from Life magazine, hosted by google
Sam Leith in today’s Guardian has written about her experiences working in an open plan office – in essence, an ethnographic study of territorial anxiety and opportunities to acquire cake and gossip.
Sitting in our very open plan, very noisy office, trying to avoid the siren call of the chocolate chip cookies two desks down, it reminded me of everything I’ve written before about Creative Spaces. Working where you work best (and the acknowledgement that people rarely produce their best work surrounded by strip lighting and a constantly ringing phone) is all very well in theory – but what about the economic reality of cost-per-square foot of office space and the expense involved in creating break out rooms, comfy corners and giving everyone a desk-with-a-view?
In fact, google research revealed that (doh!) information flowed fastest in an office environment among people who were closely packed together.
But can we really be productive in such a busy, distracting environment? I certainly get more ‘done’ when I work from home – but then of course all that Information isn’t Flowing via me if I’m not there. On the other hand, this post and accompanying comments on mommy blogger site TheMomSpeak suggests that the average full-time homeworker isn’t exactly Productivity Central either.
Thanks to Amelia for pointing out johnnyvulkan’s coining of ‘Lurking’ – getting distracted maintaining twitter, facebook, flickr etc while at work (wherever that might be). Of course he added that as a ‘media professional’ it was all just research : -)
In the Archie Norman era, Asda apparently encouraged head office staff to wear special baseball caps when they were thinking so they wouldn’t be disturbed (reasons not to work at Asda HQ #87) and white ipod headphones have taken on a second life in OfficeLand as a ‘please don’t bother me’ sign, but its still an imperfect system.
Perhaps we’ll just have to grin and bear all the distractions – and head for the sanctity of home when it gets too much, assuming we can avoid the temptations of the TV…
4 comments 15 January, 2009
don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to sit quietly
Prolific marketing blogger and author Seth Godin writes: [if you employ knowledge workers] it’s hard for me to see why you’d bother having someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.
He also comments don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to sit quietly. He’s right – space is expensive. Home working is cheaper.
So if you are a knowledge worker like us Planners and are planning on showing up to work at the actual office when most of the point of being there is to be doing lots of collaborative, creative stuff with your colleagues – why do most agency offices mainly consist of a sea of desks?
I don’t think that introducing hotdesking to make room for more sofas and beanbags is the answer. On friend who has tried it describes it as ‘lukewarm desking’ when everyone ended up sitting at the same place day after day and latecomers got the dodgy desk near the photocopier.
My place are quite good about encouraging us to work from home if we need some peace and quiet (we’re so rammed in here that the latest space saving idea is – smaller desks) but we haven’t quite cracked the space-to-work-together challenge yet.
It comes back to Creative Spaces – the function of an office should be about engendering co-operation and creative thinking. Not the soundtrack of laptops being attacked in a two finger gallop.
Photo (apparently of Yahoo’s London office) by cackhanded on flickr
2 comments 20 May, 2008
work where you work best
It struck me, as I was having an in-depth discussion on media strategy in the ladies’ loos this morning, that some of my most productive meetings have taken place in the most unlikely locations.
I’m not talking about the ‘fourth floor meeting room at 10am’ kind of meetings (which in my experience rarely produce the kind of break throughs that win pitches or have clients weeping in gratitude) but the impromptu ‘lets have the meeting right here’ ones.
Thinking back, some of my most productive ‘meetings’ have taken place:
- in GNER’s restaurant car
- on a fire escape
- in a traffic jam on the M1
- on a horse
- standing in the road outside the office
I posted about Creative Spaces earlier this year but now I’m thinking that maybe its not so much about a stimulating environment that is conducive to creative thinking, but some kind of serendipity.
Add comment 7 September, 2007
Where would you chose to work?
My part of our building is the big, modern open plan bit, which I share with 75 others. I obviously did something wrong in a previous life because the other 100 or so agency bods are happily ensconced in the adjoining mansion (yes, really, with a secret staircase and everything), complete with French windows, original fireplaces and garden views. Sigh.
My room is huge, you could fit a couple of full size swimming pools in it, but it can get a tad noisy. One of the premises of the need for Creative Spaces is that no-one can be expected to do their best work less than a foot from their nearest colleague, surrounded by strip lighting and constantly ringing phones.
The thing is, if I was shut off by myself in glorious executive solitude I’d miss the buzz. The hum. The start of the day when everyone is in and no-one has gone out yet and the volume level rises with the promise of what the day might bring. Coffee is drunk, opinions exchanged, phone calls answered and laptops switched on. Tannoys call out, printers hum and mobiles buzz. Its an orchestra of sorts, orchestrating the business of running an agency.
Add comment 15 May, 2007
Buildings that make you feel
I went back and visited that cathedral this week.
It was an oddly moving experience. I’m not religious, but the combination of architecture and atmosphere affected me.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that the architecture and interior design of buildings are crucially important because they can deeply affect how we feel. Which kind of brings me back to my much earlier post on Creative Spaces.
We all need space to think, to breathe and to feel.
Add comment 25 April, 2007
Creating Passionate Users
I’ve only recently discovered Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users. Kathy works out of a vintage 1966 23-foot Silver Streak trailer. Certainly a Creative Space and what she referes to as a playful work environment.
Kathy’s blog has quickly become a must-read for me and today’s post on managing expectations – don’t make the demo look done is fascinating. Her bottom line is that how ‘done’ something looks should match how ‘done’ something is. Common sense? You’d be surprised…
Add comment 28 December, 2006
Work in progress
Work hasn’t been much of a Creative Space recently because we’ve been going through a refurb and also budging up to make room for all the extra people that are joining us. I have however learnt a lot of important things over the last couple of months:
1. The piece of paper you want is always at the bottom of your plastic packing crate
2. Wherever you left your desk the night before, it will be somewhere entirely different the next morning
3. Office chairs can not only move position overnight, but change their height and incline too
4. Removals men do not feel the cold and will therefore leave external doors open all day while you sit there shivering in four layers of woolies
5. Your coat is not missing. Its just that the coat stand it was hanging off has been moved to other end of the building.
6. It is actually possible to continue to work while someone puts twenty desks together immediately behind you using an electric drill
Add comment 27 December, 2006
Is your desk the window to your personality?
Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book Blink describes an experiment where a psychologist called Samuel Gosling asked members of the public to rate college students against key personality traits on the sole basis of spending 15 minutes in their dorm rooms.
He found that these strangers were more accurate than the student’s own friends in rating the students on conscientiousness, emotional stability and their openness to new experiences.
Could this be applied to the work environment? Does a messy desk or office indicate to those around you a messy mind? Or is it a sign of creativity? Or is it all a load of nonsense?
My desk is (apparently) freakishly tidy, but I hope that people don’t imagine my thinking is just as unimaginative. Maybe there’s hope – Gosling’s research also discovered that these strangers weren’t nearly as good as the student’s friends in measuring how animated, talkative, outgoing and agreeable someone is.
I think in the end it comes back to us all needing the right space around us to help us think, whatever that space may be. Which brings me rather neatly back to Creative Spaces.
1 comment 24 December, 2006
