While many firms employ telework or a free agency style of working, those concepts may not be right for everyone. For many firms large and small, the office will be the center of the working world. That being the case, it's important to have an office space that inspires ideas and encourages creativity and innovation. And yes, an office space CAN do that, just like it can hurt the ability to do that. When I've worked for different organizations I've never had a workspace that was designed to facilitate creativity, though sometimes there are accidental features that do help.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that balancing collaboration with concentration is critical in a creative environment. While the specifics of your design will depend on factors such as the particular field in which you work, the nature of the creative work you do, or the size of your firm, you really need to keep this concept in mind. teamwork is often important in creative fields, but so is independent work, and you need a workspace that encourages both.
In my current job, we set up a strategic planning division last year, and some of the members were so taken with their newfound importance that they wanted to have all our meetings behind closed doors. This had the double effect of isolating us from all the other divisions with whom we should be working and fueling suspicion that we were up to something like cutting budgets. Though we finally got past this childish point, it did remind us that there are times when you do need to work privately, and having a place to do that, in addition to encouraging collaboration, was important.
The common path taken by creative firms is to get out of individual offices and and have some sort of open floor plan. This is good when you want to cooperate, but can be bad if it creates a noise level that makes independent work difficult. There are some ways to address this. One might be to have individual cubicles designed in a way that minimizes the noise flow throughout the office, while having a central area in the room where people can roll their chairs and discuss. Another option might be to have two rooms...I worked for an agency 10 years ago that had one room with individual cubicles while the other had an open design, and Creatives chose the room in which they wanted to work based on their individual preferences. originally, the leadership was moving in the direction of having both rooms incorporate an open design, because "that's how you encourage creativity," but they weren't taking into account the fact that individuals' work habits differ.
It's worth having informal places for collaboration as well. In many offices, the coffee lounge or snack room can serve this purpose. In my current office that room is very small, has two large refrigerators, a microwave, industrial-size coffee maker, and is located right next to some cubicles so there's a sign asking people to keep conversations to a minimum. In the process, we're losing out on a great, well-lubricated (in a coffee sense) place for some interesting conversations. A better solution might be to have a larger space, with some small tables and a white board or two on the wall, where spontaneous conversations can lead to something productive.
Informal places for self-work would be useful too. When I taught at a small college a few years ago, another professor pointed out what was missing from the large area between the dorms and classroom buildings: benches. Even though thousands of students passed through this area every day, there was no place to just sit and think about what they'd just discussed in class. OK, now, every student's not going to be so introspective as to need a bench, but what this professor pointed out was that the message the school was sending was "get out of class and get back to your room...don't stop to think about what you just learned." Having someplace away from the individual office where one can stop, get a change of scenery, and do some thinking without checking e-mail every 5 minutes, can be a useful thing. For me, i often leave my office and head down to Starbucks for something different, which is great for Starbucks but, because it's along a major corridor in our building, doesn't provide a great atmosphere for deep thinking.
One interesting idea is to incorporate a share bookshelf bookshelf somewhere into your floor plan. Creatives often seem to have more books than other folks and a strong desire to share if only to have someone else with whom they can discuss the latest Christopher Moore novel or new ideas in photography techniques. Having a central place for sharing books, magazines and journals can encourage more professional reading and spark new discussions that can head off in very interesting directions.
As we noted above, the specifics of your design will depend on what attributes are important for your firm's success. There are some good basic principles to follow, though, and one firm full of Creatives offers a useful checklist for office design. There's another interesting article that has a discussion with architects and designers about what they like to put into a creative office...and perhaps, where they'd like to work themselves.
You can go simple or complex in your design, and during the dot com boom many firms included silly elements designed to make the office more interesting. One friend at a web gaming firm in Berkeley had a slide that went between floors, obviating the need for stairs (well, for going down, anyway) and there are plenty of fire station poles, hot tubs, and so forth. There's a place for "highly-designed" offices, and maybe your firm could benefit from that. You might also need something much simpler (and less expensive). Either way, you need to put some thought into what kind of space will best serve your Creatives.
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