Why is the working environment so important?

• A person's work environment is very important. After all, we spend nearly as much time at work as we do at home. According to a recent North American Survey, nearly 50% of workers rank their work environment as the most critical element of job satisfaction.

• In fact, they ranked environment above praise and recognition, compensation and benefits, job security, and promotions.

What makes a high quality work environment? The five major elements of Office Space Design:

• Comfort - Assuring that work stations are adjustable and suited to the task, whether sitting, standing, spending hours at the computer or on the phone

• Efficiency - Locating work teams in convenient proximity, placing equipment near workers who use it most

• Communication - Organizing each department for the most effective means of communicating internally and externally with co-workers and customers

• Productivity - Maintaining a logical flow throughout the office

• Effectiveness - Establishing clear goals and objectives for the work environment

• There are 86 billion square feet of commercial office space in the United States.

• The business of these offices is vast in scope: law, advertising, government, finance, and manufacturing.

• The legacy of these offices ranges from the most established banking firms to budding e-Commerce companies.

• Despite these wide variations in business scope and organizational structure, the purpose of every square foot of commercial office space is the same, facilitating communication and serving as a place where work can be accomplished and organizational needs met.

• While the purpose of an office space may be clearly defined, office space design remains, by necessity, much more fluid.

• Businesses trying to succeed are forced to constantly change and adapt in the fast-paced and dynamic arena of corporate competition.

• The design of the office space must transition, in order for the space to remain relevant and functional for new organizational needs

designing, as a creative process, begins with you.

• a design project, as an expression of need or desire, begins with a user, or client.

• the process of transforming a client’s needs and desires into a physical, visible, space or object, begins with you.

• to be a creative designer you must have interests, you must have experiences that enrich your interests, you must accumulate appropriate knowledge and skills that help you conduct the creative processes involved in designing.

the beginning point of a design exploration is open to your own individual interests and thoughts.

• how you begin a design exploration is substantially up to you.

• you can do almost anything at the very beginning of a design exploration, and it can work for you as a way to get into the complexities of a project.

• for example, to design a portfolio/graphics page layout, you could:• spill ink on a piece of paper and let it run into a variety of shapes as

gravity, and the absorption of the paper determine• draw out a regular, geometric grid, of half inch squares.• draw out an irregular geometric grid.• draw out a set of lines that seem to be of the moment, gestural, and not

necessarily ‘rational’.

how you begin is up to you, but to be a good designer you must have interests in the things that make up the

world of design

• what kinds of things catch the attention of designers?

• materials: in terms of all the qualities that make different materials interesting, and beautiful.

• geometry: the application of various shapes, the relationships between objects, the clarity of ‘pure’ forms (circle, sphere, square, cube, pyramid, equilateral triangle)

• size and scale: the play between very small and very large in objects and in spaces

• color: the richnes that is created by experiencing colors used in a purposeful relationship; colors that speak of an important ‘reality’, such as a regional material (red tile roofs of the southwest)

to do a complex activity at a high level, to do it really well, takes an unreasonable effort!

• it seems pretty clear that our ability to learn, and achieve high levels of skill in complex activities requires a great deal of regular, repeated, and focused effort.

• it may seem like too much effort sometimes, but such is life.

• if you want to be good at something there seem to be no ‘easy’ way to get there. the exception to this thought is that such work can seem ‘easier’ if you enjoy it, and if doing it seems to happen in a pleasant, enjoyable way.

when you are working on a design project you have to use all of your powers of concentration, creative thought, and enthusiasm.

• a design project is a setting in which decisions have to be made, at every step of the project.

• you must train yourself to step forward, and offer an answer, a proposal, to any question that is revealed. if you do this, you will discover that you have more knowledge than you thought, and you will impress those around you with your skill, and your discipline specific abilities.

concepts, parti, motif, theme

fumihiko maki

fumihiko maki

• Born in Tokyo in 1928, Maki earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Tokyo in 1952.

• He spent the next year at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, then enrolled at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, earning a Master of Architecture degree.

• In 1960, Maki became a founding member of the Metabolists, an influential group of young, avant garde Japanese architects who viewed the growth of buildings and cities as a fundamentally organic process, analogous to branches and leaves sprouting off a tree's central trunk.

Pritzker Prize recipients

• http://www.sztuka-architektury.pl/index.php?ID_PAGE=30

concepts

• A 'holiday' is a concept. A 'seaside holiday' is more specific. There can be yet more detail: a beach holiday, a yachting holiday, a bird-watching holiday, an adventure holiday, etc.

• The value of concepts is that we can use them to 'breed' ideas.

• Concepts can be categories of functions or an assembly of things or activities. An 'activity' is a concept. A 'game' is a more specific concept. 'Football' is yet more specific. The match between two specified teams is the actuality.

motif

• A design or designed image that is repeated over and over with little to no differences.

• Repeated unit to create visual rhythm.

theme

how do designers come up with creative images, uses of material, forms?

how to be more creative

• creativity comes from an overarching need to be creative; a financial crisis, for example, or a war can cause an explosion in creativity

• creativity comes from a total mind and body focus on a problem, sometimes over an extended period of time

• an extended period of time will also allow your sub-conscious to work on the problem

• people need to be open to new experiences and life time learning a lot of creativity comes from observing how others are doing things and then realizing that something you learned in a completely different field of endeavour could be applied in a unconventional way to this seemingly unrelated task at hand

• creativity comes from SEEING and QUESTIONING ﾑ t is a way of training yourself not to accept what everyone else does simply because that is the way it is done and the way it has always been done

• creativity comes from being able to reduce problems to their basic building blocks. creativity comes from simplicity and clarity not complexity

• creativity is contagious and is inspired by contact with others who are upbeat, positive, creative types

• however, creativity should not be confused with enthusiasm ﾑ truly creative ideas are not full of holes

• creativity is often enhanced by verbalization even if that verbalization takes the form that it did in the film Castaway where Tom Hanks has to verbalize his ideas to his doll, Wilson. Tom starts making better and more creative decisions after he invents someone to talk to

• put things down in a written form that can take the form of a flow chart, a written description, a spreadsheet, whatever the discipline of writing something down and the formality of it helps complete your ideas

• read a lot!

identify individual people you find to be very creative and study their work. try to understand the elements of

their work that are‘creative’

luis barragan he is famous for his use of simple forms and intense colors

phillippe starck is one of the great creative designers of the moment