How Likeable Office Space Makes Teams More Creative

The spaces we occupy shape who we are and how we behave. They have a substantial impact on our mood and creative performance. People spend a big part of their day sitting in the office space. In the same room, or even at the same desk. It seems necessary to optimize the organization of the workspace in the most favourable way possible. If you’re working in a dull office space, what’s there to inspire you?

The idea of a Creative Room came up a few months ago. Because many of our co-workers communicate digitally throughout the day, the thing that we wanted to improve and pay attention to was our shared working space. In our day-to-day creative work, we need a place to bring together all positive or even negative energy (which is also inspiring!), and all ideas stuck somewhere in the back of our heads. A pleasant environment which would allow us to arrange small meetings, discussions, brainstorming sessions, materialize what’s intangible… but also, once every now and then, allow us to have a quiet and focus-friendly zone to make big ideas happen!

Why not use Hackday as a chance to change that? One day for creating one project seemed like a perfect opportunity to make our little dream come true.

We started Hackday with a generative design workshop. Based on our previous experiences of interacting with the Creative Room, we came up with improvements that fit the needs of our coworkers better. We did some prototyping, rearrangements, brainstorming, sensory stimulation (sight, touch and smell). Finally, we reached a concept later transferred into an actual working idea.

The project brief featured a few key points:

The Workspace

A creative room has to be as versatile as possible, allowing us to work in a variety of positions. Having a range of workstations suited to different work styles or habits is the key to ensuring that every employee can do his or her best work. Therefore, we’ve decided to furnish our room with a colourful couch, a standing desk, a wooden table with a set of comfortable chairs, and even a soft carpet.
You can work any way you like here.

The Atmosphere

The second goal was the lighting, which is absolutely crucial in every interior design. We are lucky to have a set of windows and a glass door on one wall, overlooking our lovely garden. It brings soft natural light into the room during the day. However, because the days become shorter in autumn and winter, we’ve equipped the Creative Room with a wide range of artificial lighting fixtures, and we did it with style. Lamps, spotlights, traditional overhead lighting, and a cool feature – the HUE bulbs!

Plants, plants, plants!

The back door in the Creative Room leads straight into the beautiful garden – but that wasn’t enough for us.

We came up with an idea to bring some nature back inside. A variety of plant life arranged around the room added a finishing touch. Working in an environment with natural elements can do a lot of good for you. Not only it lowers your stress levels but can also reduce the office air pollution!

By the end of Hackday we put the Creative Room to the test. Can it really boost your creative superpowers? The answer is… hell yeah! The atmosphere we were able to establish there inspired us to design one more thing that we thought was still missing:

The Posters

It paid off pretty well, actually even a bit too well, because we ended up with more poster designs than the walls could handle. Sooo… you have to be careful entering the room, because creativity is in the air.

You’ll find many albums and books here: about UX, UI, graphic design and much more. Ultimately, our Creative Room and its interior design is full of details that are meant to spark creativity and inspire.

The Hackday challenge itself was an excellent and satisfying experience once again, but an even more rewarding feeling came the day after, when we saw that the new Creative Room was filled with our developers 🙂

We are happy to say it has now become one of the favourite rooms in the office! Oh yeah, and we came at the 3rd place at the Hackday contest, which proves that Hackday isn’t only about the code, but about bringing great ideas to life.