“Creative Office.” Everyone wants to work in one. As our workforce increases in digital savvy, and as workplaces ranging from those of tech to entertainment to even law begin to merge with respect to their “look” and “feel,” the mandate to architects is to create work environments that enable one common aspiration—innovation.
The term “innovation,” previously reserved for a rarefied “discovery” or “invention”—usually in science, medicine, or engineering—has become so commonplace in our tech-driven culture that achieving it is now the shared goal of every company out there. If it’s “new” or “creative” it’s “innovative,” and to be called an innovator is a coveted label of approval. (In today’s auto industry, even, the bottom line is now “innovate or die.”)
Thanks to its broadened definition, innovation is now accessible. Rather than reinvent the wheel, one need simply repackage it (and perhaps make it spin faster and travel further) in order to be recognized as an innovator. With this, along with the epiphany that innovation is something to be shared, has come a realization that architecture is a powerful tool for enabling innovation. Because innovation grows out of a creative process, the workplace everyone wants to occupy is a creative office. Architects are experts in creativity, and know that certain types of physical environments help it thrive.
Individuals, in fact, need two kinds of spaces to maximize creativity: those that support the generation of ideas (brainstorming in the bullpen), and those that support the testing of those ideas. A symbiotic coexistence of these two types of spaces can be profoundly successful in upping a company’s innovation quotient.
Here are five strategies that JFAK Architects deploys to nurture innovation:
1) Designing Interactive Spaces—Nurture Ideation
The successful creative office encourages an open exchange of ideas, which promotes ideation and leads to innovation. From structured spaces to host large as well as small events, to in-between spaces that encourage “accidental” encounters (the “water cooler effect”), the architecture of the creative office outfits every available bit of real estate to advance dialogue. A simple hallway is now widened by 12” to 18” and punctuated with chairs, small tables, booths, pods, and mini-lounges. These spaces imbue the entire environment with a unique identity—important in promoting pride of belonging. They also encourage mobility: Science tells us that a change of setting makes the creative juices flow, and individuals can travel within the office, change their setting, and transform a traditionally static workplace into a fluid envelope for creativity.
2) Design for Varying Degrees of Privacy—Provide Flexibility
JFAK’s creative offices consist of well-planned series of spaces of varying scales, with varying degrees of privacy. These include closed rooms of differing sizes that act as conference venues, small meeting rooms, or offices. The formal “event space” is flexible—curtains provide sound attenuation when necessary, but the space usually remains open to encourage eavesdropping and participation. The traditional “break room” is now open to allow for spontaneous and unexpected ideation to take place over a cup of coffee, lunch, or a snack. It becomes a different kind of workspace that feeds the body as well as opening up the mind.
Semi-private areas for semi-formal meetings and discussions, open office areas and hot-desked zones, and lounges of all sizes fill out the program. These need not be clearly labeled; like water, the creative innovators who occupy this environment fill in the spaces naturally, and appropriate those in which they feel most comfortable. The architecture acknowledges that each can be a productive workplace where innovation can happen.
3) Wellness and High Performance—Integrate Sustainability
A group of users who share a workspace can connect to encourage good practices that promote well-being, not just of themselves but of their environment—and this has a lasting effect that reverberates out to a larger global community.
Architecture sustains sustainability. The design of well-lit spaces that cater to human comfort while maintaining economy and resource conservation, along with the incorporation of high-performance equipment, energy-saving appliances and fixtures, and myriad other intelligent measures, engenders the long life of an environment and user happiness.
Harder to quantify is architectural delight, in the form of well-designed spaces that speak to a collective identity or brand, uplift the spirit, and make a workforce proud to occupy its space. To deny that this is an important piece of the sustainability puzzle is shortsighted. A sustainable environment is not just a high-performance environment; it’s an inspiring environment, and adds recruitment and retention value.
4) Connectedness—Integrate Technology
The successful “creative office” merges different functions and spaces into one unified environment supported by interactive media. At La Kretz Innovation Campus (LKIC), a hallway is a community art gallery, and the main event space is rented out by organizations all over Los Angeles. The content of these events, as well as the achievements of companies incubating at LKIC, are disseminated through social media, which expands LKIC’s presence exponentially and contributes to its worldwide impact. Information platforms—such as screens in the lobby and at the break area – bring in news of what’s happening in connected industries around the world. Connectedness—not just to other users, but to the like-minded global community—is an integrated part of the workplace, and each individual’s understanding of “inclusion” is continually enhanced.
5) Put Everything Under One Roof—Nurture Innovation
Space allowing, one of the most powerful things that a company can do is put all components that make up its creative innovation loop under one roof. There are as many ways to do this as there are companies, but LKIC, once again, is a successful example. There, every bit of the creative loop is architecturally accounted for: spaces in which to ideate, collaborate, research, and develop; spaces in which to debate and dialogue; a makerspace in which to prototype; hot-desked areas to accommodate resident experts in marketing, distribution, financing, and business planning; exhibit spaces in which to show off product; and perhaps most significantly, labs, classrooms, and offices of a municipal utility company (the LA Department of Water and Power), which provides an all-important test-bed for new products being prototyped in-house.
LKIC is a carefully designed social laboratory that plugs into the city’s ecosystem, but it’s not stiff. It’s an open and flexible environment to realize projects and accelerate the best social and cleantech innovation projects; a place where public and private organizations, policymakers and inventors, and storytellers and community leaders cooperate through shared expertise, technology, and space.
Architecture can enable innovation, and given the direction of the contemporary workplace, it has the obligation and privilege to do so. To succeed, architects should be given license to design intelligent and responsive environments that are flexible, sustainable, technologically integrated, and desirable. No easy task; yet, if a workplace fulfills these goals, if its architecture draws people to want to occupy it, interact within it, and make great stuff, innovation will happen.
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