Space & Place – Using the physical to influence the psychological

One of the great challenges in galvanizing a team to achieve new levels of creativity and innovation lies in the intersection between the tangible and the intangible. Missing from the thinking in the realm of innovation and product development is the way in which space not only influences, but directly informs, the quality and productivity of innovation and product development teams. So often the space in which people reside is an afterthought or, if it is considered at all, it reflects organizational hierarchies or norms of behavior defined by functional expertise. In many cases it fosters a silo-based mentality that destroys collaborative solution-seeking activities. Space and place directly prime us to be innovative, or not…

The smell of mystery…and successful innovation
One of the classic uses of space as a way to buoy innovation occurred at the aerospace and defense contractor Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin) with the formation of their Skunk Works®. It was the height of World War II and Lockheed had been asked to work on a new jet fighter. Given the project to develop Clarence L. “ Kelly” Johnson hand-picked engineers and manufacturing people and housed them in a windowless office with hand-me-down furniture in Burbank, California. Each new team member was cautioned that design and production of the new jet fighter was to be carried out in strict secrecy. No one was to discuss the project with anyone outside the four walls of the facility. The physical space essentially became a clubhouse of sorts (not the first time an innovation team would find that moniker applied.)

The Greeks get bent out of shape
Yet, the manipulation of space in order to evoke a mood, feeling or even inspire is nothing new. For as long as humans have altered the landscape with structures we have used that alteration to influence and change behavior. Sometimes this is conducted overtly. Sometimes and perhaps more commonly this is executed covertly. Take the Parthenon for instance. This Ancient Greek structure sitting above the city of Athens was the crowning architectural element of Grecian society at one point (perhaps even today). It inspired awe with its massive perfection. The only problem is that it wasn’t perfect – at least not in any straight-lined geometrical sense. The Parthenon’s architects and builders understood that if they did not employ entasis, a process for curving straight lines into convex in order to give them the appearance they are straight (yes, really), their crowning achievement would appear to be collapsing in on itself. Not such a stellar way to inspire the masses, right? They understood that if their audience was to see perfection the building must not be “perfect”.

The creatives run amok
Even when we attempt to directly address space as a fundamental support to innovation practices we can misstep. Chiat\Day (now TBWA\Chiat\Day) was at the vanguard of the advertising business in the 1990’s – they were the creators of such classic campaigns as, Apple’s “1984” and “Think Different” and the $30 million Reebok campaign, which centered on the rivalry between decathletes Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson. The founder, Jay Chiat, wanted to unleash creativity in his Venice Beach office (strangely enough, also in California – apparently a hotbed of physical space-related innovation). Key to doing that was Project Chrysalis, a think tank designed to propel the agency away from its current restraints of time and space.

Chrysalis developed the blueprint for the industry’s first “virtual” office, a fully portable, organic workplace that broke with traditional concepts of office use and featured state-of-the-art communications technology. His vision for a virtual office was realized in 1994 as a “clubhouse” (see – back again!) designed by leading architect Frank Gehry to unleash creativity – agency staff were given only portable equipment, cellphones (aka. “bricks”), laptops and the edict to work wherever they wanted as the mood struck them. The intent being to “free” them from the confines of the physical space. Instead of reveling in their new-found un-tethered freedom the staff took to arriving early, commandeering space, and fighting pitched battles over the limited space available. With no personal space to anchor them, everything became a clamor to claim the personal and for some, way too hard. Needless to say the experiment was scrapped.

Today the TBWA\Chiat\Day facility takes a different approach. It is a miniature town with a mix of both “public” and “private spaces” with places to gather and bump-into each other. It even has a Central Park. The opportunity for the “water-cooler” conversation on a wider scale is writ-large across the organization. It is much more conducive to collaboration and creativity, because it is both unlike any office space you might experience, but so familiar in that it draws on very real archetypes. Main Street and the village square are both represented.

The cutting edge of physical systems
One of the most interesting developments in use of physical space to foster and promote specific behaviors and feelings is a marriage of the work of Maturana and Varela, two Chilean biologists, who coined the term “autopoeisis” in 1972, and the work of noted architect Christopher Alexander in the development of what he termed, a “pattern language” in a book he co-wrote with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California, with writing credits also to Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel for describing physical space requirements to meet specific needs. The marriage of these concepts is coming to fruition in the work of a graduate student at MIT by the name of Neri Oxman. She has created a body of work around the concept of materialecology:

“…an interdisciplinary research initiative that undertakes design research in the intersection between architecture, engineering, computation, and ecology. As such, this initiative is concerned with material organization and performance across all scales of design thought and practice. As such, it seeks to promote and define a design research agenda which is ecological in nature, in ideology and in material practice; it aims at embracing the evolving elements of change in both (and indeed related) social constructs and environmental descriptions of the ever changing built environment. materialecology undertakes research in advanced digital applications for architectural practice and pursuits – their contribution to a design paradigm promoting generative design processes.”

In this one area of practice, the implications of an holistic approach to the design and creation of space through a multi-disciplinary approach offers not only a framework for supporting innovation, but a frame of reference for what innovation could and should be in vibrant innovation cultures: open, immersive, divergent, exploratory, collaborative, generative, envelope-pushing, and synergistic.

Key questions anyone seeking to foster an innovation culture through the manipulation of physical space should ask themselves are:

Only after consideration of these questions then, and only then, should we step into the breach and begin our work.