Where and when do you get good ideas? As I discussed in this column a few months ago (“Time for a change from doing to being”), most people get their best ideas anywhere but in the office. This shouldn’t be surprising if we look at the interior design of the average company. These days, many of us realize that standard office design, which was created for productivity in traditional businesses, is ineffective at producing results in modern, agile, creative organizations. How can we improve on the interior design of our outdated office spaces? What does a creative office design look like? How can we use office design to promote great thinking and innovation in our firms?

I have just returned from a conference on entrepreneurship and innovation at Stanford University. Thanks to my business creativity counterpart at Stanford, Tina Seelig, I had a chance to visit the renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (“D-School”). The institute uses a new interdisciplinary education approach to teach students business creativity, design thinking and rapid prototyping. After seeing what works at the D-School, together with what I’ve seen and read about other places, you should consider the following eight factors for designing a creative office:

1. First impressions matter: Management guru Tom Peters said of his first visit to the Silicon Valley industrial design company IDEO: “The moment I stepped into the office I knew that this is a creative place.” So think carefully when designing the entrance of your creative office to send a signal to your employees, customers and other visitors that this is where innovation happens. When you enter the D-School (which was conceived by IDEO founder David Kelley), you first step into a kitchen with a long coffee bar and free supply of food and beverages. This space invites people to stop by and have a quick informal chat, exchanging ideas and thoughts with colleagues and visitors in a relaxed way. Innovation happens often in the intersection between different concepts, ideas and domains, and cross-pollination of ideas through such short interaction is the design objective behind this central meeting zone.
2. Expansive, bright thinking needs expansive, bright offices: Make sure that your creative office never physically constricts your creators; small spaces will produce small ideas. Have many big windows and good lighting, as light is important in stimulating creative ideas. As the US writer Aaron Rose said: “In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.” Choose a room with high ceilings if at all possible. Remember that one definition of the word “ceiling” is “the upper limit, especially set by regulation.’ You don’t want to limit the thoughts and ideas of your employees by settling for a low ceiling.
3. Keep it rough: Idea creation is messy, and chaotic. Don’t spend money on expensive carpeting and wallpaper. Instead go for a room design where the inevitable spillage of paint or glue is no disaster. Tina Seelig explained that in the D-School the focus is on the creative work process and not on the room or the things in it. The space is for thinking about ideas, and any worrying about things like nice furniture is time and energy wasted.
4. The room must fit the idea, or the idea will be deformed to fit the room: Traditional offices are designed to separate people from each other by putting them in boxes. Managers reside in their private offices, while common employees are crammed into small cubicles. No wonder that thinking is constrained and “inside the box” — cube-villes actively discourage innovation. A creative office eliminates fixed boxes to invite collaboration and unrestricted communication between employees and managers. Kristina Zanic, founder of the Bangkok-headquartered regional interior design and architecture firm dwp — design worldwide partnership, explains that the only walls they left in their creative office are around a meeting room for clients who prefer privacy when discussing a project. She and her fellow managing partners sit out in the open space together with all other employees and are thus easily accessible for communication.
5. Put your office on wheels: At the D-School, all furniture is on wheels. Movable tables, sofas, and whiteboards coupled with stackable chairs and small stools allow for quick reconfiguration of the office space for different tasks such as ideation sessions, prototyping, and final project presentations. Movable transparent separation walls mean that a single room can provide private environments or big open spaces to cater to the differing needs of different tasks.
6. Invest in technology, not in furniture: The D-School project was started following a private donation of 30 million USD by SAP founder Hasso Plattner. Despite the extravagant funding, all furniture in the D-School came from the budget furniture store IKEA. In a creative office, the going gets rough from time to time, and damage is to be expected. Your furniture should be durable, but inexpensive enough that replacing it engenders no major drama. Your technology, on the other hand, must be state-of-the-art. At the Stanford D-School, you will find plenty of workstations equipped with the latest iMacs, high-end printers, flat-screen TVs, LED projectors, video equipment, and cutting-edge software — all linked together by a wireless network.
7. Creativity requires rest, and play: A creative office needs spaces where employees can recharge. Put a day bed in a darkened corner with a curtain, so employees can take a nap when they need to. Provide a relaxation corner with a TV, music, video games, books and magazines. Your most creative days were probably in kindergarten — so provide your employees with some opportunities for play in your creative office, too, and trust that this will ignite creative sparks for your business challenges in line with the advice of the great Greek philosophers Plato (“Life must be lived as play”) and Heraclitus: “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”
8. Don’t skimp on raw materials: A creative office needs to have sufficient working materials available for its employees: Post-it notes, flipchart paper, scissors, glue, masking tape, cardboard, foam, cloth, modeling clay, and so on. Store the different materials in transparent boxes on wheeled shelves. And make sure they don’t run out; each minute your creative people spend looking for a red marker is a minute they’re not creating, or worse yet, a minute when they can lose the thread of a great idea.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2007. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 8 November 2007.