Framing Creative Spaces

An important first iteration in my design research aimed to determine what we mean by creative spaces. By giving substance to this at an early stage, it creates a starting point and handles, or a given context, for subsequent iterations and designs. Central questions in this iteration were: how do we define a creative space? What are the qualities of these spaces? And, are there patterns (or good practices) for designing them?

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Cover of Designing Creative Space, by Katja Thoring

By diving into various publications on the subject I have been able to approach creative spaces from different perspectives. To date, I have found two visions very valuable in relation to my research. In his book “The Theatre of Work” 1. architect Clive Wilkinson addresses what he learned while designing ‘new’ workplaces for creative organizations. In addition to a history in workplace design and (his) real-world examples, he offers seven lessons or principles for building creative communities. Secondly, I found Katja Thoring‘s research into creative spaces just as relevant. In her dissertation “Designing Creative Space” 2. she describes findings from her own research into environments, including those in design schools, that facilitate creative design processes and support different ‘designerly’ activities. In addition to defining a creative space, her work offers a typology of creative spaces, the qualities they offer and a set of design patterns to learn from.

Building Creative Communities

The diverse experiences Wilkinson and his team have gained in projects for creative companies has impacted their vision and approach to workplace design. Driven by the belief that the environment plays an enormous role in facilitating human relations, their work focuses primarily on building creative communities through intensive consultation and collaboration with clients. Although every project becomes its own unique exploration about a better community, the goal remains consistent: to create environments, or stage sets, which succeed in making people feel connected and engaged, and contribute to enriching and strengthening an organizational culture that cares for its people. To this Wilkinson adds: “Creativity will flourish within communities that genuinely support their people.”

The first fundamental lesson they learned from working with creative companies is summarized in what he calls “Lessons from the city: landmarks and destinations.” By using the city model as a template for creative workplaces, you can tap into people’s existing mental models of cities. They intuitively understand how cities work and how to use them. People enjoy the visual richness, and the energy and variety of the urban experience, they create favoured routes to destinations meaningful to them and use landmarks to aid their orientation. Movement here, as in cities, is key. It effects the (visible) energy in the space, physical health, possible serendipitous interactions and could get people to engage more fully with the workplace community. ‘Functional inconvenience’ is sometimes used to maximise this effect. To me, this term of workplace theorist Franklin Becker is similar to what is coined in UX design as design for friction.

In the second lesson, “Culture and the office as brand ambassador,” Wilkinson states that, particularly for modern knowledge workers, the office as an expression of and evolved corporate brand is essential. But this expression is different and far more complex than the public (outfacing) brand consumers get to experience. It is ‘constructed’ out of multiple social, ethical and philosophical viewpoints and carries the intangible and primordial value of belonging to a family. This community brand functions as a sense of centre or heart for both the company and its employees. According to Wilkinson, a similar sense of centre or heart in a physical space is often achieved by adoption of urban planning tactics: a centrally-configured semi-public area, a ‘main-street’ or ‘square’, an atrium space. But he adds: “The type of space is less important than the sense of centre and personality that is conveyed.”

While working with ad agencies trying to disrupt their industry norms in order to be more innovative and future minded, Wilkinson and his team realised they too had to re-think much of their own design ideology. These reflections led, among other things, to the lesson of “Disruption and ‘slinky’ planning.” Most importantly, they learned that the work environment should be provocative rather than aimed purely at comfort, and that they should reflect the kind of behavior expected of creative employees. They also discovered that these modern ‘disruptive’ companies expand and shrink overnight, leading to the idea that the new workplace should be highly flexible. Because truly flexible space tend to suffer from a lack of structure, they developed a semi-structured open system space called ‘slinky planning’. By using a different visible order to assist with orientation and structure (colour coding in this case, and the reason they named it after the child’s toy), they allowed groups to expand and contract while still enjoying a sense of place within a defined work neighbourhood.

In “Choice, diversity and serendipity” Wilkinson discusses the shortcomings of ‘old’ workplace design in larger companies and argues how these environments (of uninspiring, repetitive and simplistic spaces) are utterly dysfunctional for the new types of office communities. Collaboration was essentially non-existent or difficult to establish and silos were, in his words, rampant. Observations in smaller creative organizations led to some key learnings: providing a range and diversity of different work-settings distributed throughout the office could promote formal and informal interaction. Offering a richer kind of public shared space could play into a feeling of ownership. The space needs to support ‘work away from the desk’ and casual meeting to take place productively. And, it needs to “encourage serendipity in encounters, or unstructured collaboration, as this was increasingly becoming a potent venue of knowledge sharing in the new workplace.”

Wilkinson’s fifth lesson, “Intuitive circulation and flow” is primarily an invitation or encouragement to deep-dive into Kevin Lynch’s influential work The Image of the City. Building on his earlier references to the city model, Wilkinson states “in order to communicate well, collaborate well, and move effectively around a company, you need a legible order: a pattern of movement (streets or paths), destination points (nodes), distinct work zones (neighbourhoods or districts), recognizable physical elements (landmarks).” Lynch describes the attributes affording legibility to the city as “paths, edges, nodes, districts and landmarks.” As people, we use these attributes to facilitate our understanding of, and orientation in, the city. They ‘feed’ our mental models, help us become familiar and lead to intuitive navigation. Therefore, Wilkinson notes that if we are to embrace the full complexity of the big office (small city), we need to examine all of its attributes.

From his sixth lesson, “Neighbourhoods and organizational learning,” we learn that (especially large) workplaces benefit from a structure of identifiable and manageable neighbourhoods: “They facilitate orientation in the office and give legibility to the corporate structure.” Learning occurs most powerfully at the team level, from people in our closest proximity and in practical applications within the team area. A neighbourhood of team areas not only supports this learning, it also increases the opportunity to learn from more people and other teams. Furthermore, it allows for people to belong to a smaller, and possibly stronger, community within the larger group. For Wilkinson and his team, neighbourhoods “became the social building blocks of larger organisations.” Just like in a city, neighbourhoods require some form of visual (and / or physical) boundaries. He states it’s important these boundaries should also be porous, to allow for expansion and contraction (slinky planning) without creating disconnected silos.

The seventh and last fundamental lesson they learned from also working with some smaller creative companies, it addresses the “Human scale and the workstation.” Where it is easy to ‘get lost’ and feel invisible or lonely in larger companies (or cities), smaller companies tend to feel more like an extended family. More like a village. This includes all the effects of familiarity, such as a different sense of belonging, feeling more comfortable and secure through developed relationships with colleagues, a sense of ownership of work and the company, etc. These differences led Wilkinson and his team to reduce their design considerations to the scale of the individual: “we needed to reappraise the workstation solution for the new ways of working. As the basic building block of the office, no other component wielded so much influence on the life of a worker.” They moved away from the ‘cubicle’ setup by opting for a smaller, more basic and minimal solution consisting of light, table-like surface and storage, and offset this with another important new offering for users: diversity and variety of work environments.

Definition of a Creative Space

First of all, Thoring’s work on creative spaces is quite extensive! I found her dissertation rich with valuable insights and actionable tools that emerged from thorough and recognizable methods of (design) research. I agree with her premise that a creative space encompasses spaces in both educational and business environments and that design educational environments have similar requirements to spaces in design practice. In addressing both, she places the contexts that are part of my daily practice and research at the heart of hers. The typology and pattern language of creative spaces she provides will support me in developing new ideas and concepts for living spaces and help give direction to my own designs.

Research area “Creative Space”. Designing Creative Space, Katja Thoring, TU Delft 2019 p.23

As mentioned, Thoring’s research area of “creative space” covers the intersection of creativity and the build environment in both education and practice contexts. The two parts, ‘creative’ and ‘space’, are first defined separately. Creative is used as an umbrella term for various creative activities related to design and innovation processes (e.g. generating ideas, prototypes, sketching, presenting), while space refers to any aspect of the physical environment that could have an influence on this process and that can be modified or designed. From here, Thoring defines creative space as “physical structures and elements at different scales that are deliberately designed to support creative work processes or to facilitate creativity.”

“We define creative spaces as physical structures and elements at different scales that are deliberately designed to support creative work processes or to facilitate creativity.”

Designing Creative Space, Katja Thoring, TU Delft 2019 p.23

From small to large, the scale describes items (single elements in the room), interior (layout and interior design), architecture, and neighbourhood. Different from Wilkinson, Thoring uses ‘neighbourhood’ to refer to the location within a specific urban context, the interplay of buildings and space between buildings. To me, interior and architecture seem the most promising for exploring new (creative) living spaces. They include room and furniture arrangements, installed elements (both fixed and movable), intangible characteristics (such as smell and sound), structural aspects of the building and interplay of spaces.

Thoring defines a space type as a dedicated space for a specific activity at a specific time (e.g. presentation, teamwork, model-making). She adds, “Each space has an inherent affordance that suggests the kind of activity for which the space is mainly intended, which is enforced through its configuration (e.g. the room layout and furniture).” By changing this configuration, the space type can also change, but it will require time and effort from its users. This also says something about the flexibility of the space, and perhaps that is precisely where the opportunity for living spaces lies.

From her research, Thoring distinguished five different types of creative spaces and five different spatial qualities of a creative space. A spatial quality is a space’s capacity to facilitate a specific purpose, independent of the space type. Both are illustrated in the figure below. For me, each of these space types and spatial qualities provide context to initiate new ideas and concepts for living spaces and bring focus to my goal of “transforming a creative space into a ‘living’ space.”

Typology of creative spaces. Overview of space types and spatial qualities by Katja Thoring, TU Delft

Typology of creative spaces. Overview of space types and spatial qualities. Designing Creative Space, Katja Thoring, TU Delft 2019 p.85

Further Research

During my exploration of this topic, several other publications also caught my interest. I selected the ones below to possibly deepen my findings later. These books also contain practical learnings, principles and inspiring examples of creative spaces.

Feature Image: Pallotta Teamworks HQ. Photo from The Theatre of Work, Clive Wilkinson, 2019
1 The Theatre of Work, Clive Wilkinson, 2019 Book at Frameweb
2 Designing Creative Space : A Systemic View on Workspace Design and its Impact on the Creative Process. / Thoring, Katja. 2019. 321 p.

‘Schets’ maken met ‘map’ en ‘7 lessen’. Rechts