Sydney Office Update December Leasing Magazine online | Page 15

SYDNEY OFFICE UPDATE | 13
When Gensler designed Airbnb’s
headquarters in San Francisco, the
company’s founders insisted that
the design team embed itself in the
company for a period of four months.
As Kursty Groves and Oliver Marlow
describe in their book, “Spaces for
Innovation – The Design and Science
of Inspiring Environments,” the design
team, tasked with creating “the most
creative place on earth,” internalised
the role of “Airbnb employee” in order
to better understand the organisation’s
creative process and then deliver a
space designed to facilitate the needs
of the collective.
Space exists to prompt this culture—it
aids in triggering the right kind of
conversation and the right rituals.
When they act as part of a balanced
equation, the results can be beautiful.
What can be ugly is when you’ve got
the space, but you totally are missing
the mark on culture. Think of cafes
sitting empty due to the stigmas
attached to collaborative workstyles
amongst a “work at your desk” crowd.
Innovation is about creating a unique
subculture—it’s a combination of
events, methods, words, emails, music
and food.
people as it does in the brain, but is
perceived through and influenced
by the unique modes of thought and
experience of heterogeneous groups
and teams. Together, they recombine
initial ideas, iteratively. That’s what we
call social creativity, and it’s deeply
dependent on diversity of thought,
background and skill set. Getting that
process to come about requires a bit
of alchemy—casual collisions arising
out of entropy are not necessarily as
productive as everyone leads us to
believe. It’s about facilitating those
interactions among the right team
in order to build a collective point of
view, create solidarity and allow for
new ideas to emerge through a brand
new process.
BE A HERO
Innovation is not a slide in someone’s
office, a part of someone’s title or a
top-down initiative.
INNOVATION IS EXPERIENTIAL,
CULTURAL, AND MOST OF ALL,
IT TAKES PRACTICE.
SUPER POWER #2:
MAKE CULTURE, NOT JUST SPACE SUPER POWER #3: PRACTICE
SOCIAL CREATIVITY
Let’s think beyond spaces like messy
zones, inspiration rooms or brainstorm
annexes. It’s not the tables and chairs
that bring about innovation—it’s
what you do with them that counts.
Designing a home for innovation
also means creating the right culture.
Organisational tools facilitate
innovation behaviours: like “no meeting
zones” or “five minute max rooms” or
ensuring “equal seats at the table.” It’s
also about developing language, rituals
and adding a layer of myth-making that
allows people to collaborate in a space
that is separate enough from their
day-to-day. In their book, “Whiplash:
How to Survive Our Faster Future,” MIT
Media Lab director Joi Ito and coauthor
Jeff Howe put it this way: “think
mythology, not mission.” Designers have this amazing ability
to create clarity and order to solve
problems through creative thinking.
At the individual level, what is called
creativity comes about when ideas
ricochet up and down the neocortex,
connecting ideas and sensory
messages until inspiration strikes and
those signals shoot up to the frontal
lobe, the place where the cognitive
functions of narrative and planning
take control of all those neural
connections. Innovation comes from
the creative process of recombinatory
iteration—the act of combining things
over and over again in different ways.
On an organisational level, innovation
functions based on social creativity—
where the information flows across
These go hand in hand. It can’t be
mandated, but it can be undertaken
with intention, rigor, discipline, and
importantly, design. While it’s okay for
there to be lightness around the topic
(the goal is to stop talking, start doing,
get sh*t done and have some fun) it
should always lead into uncharted
territory. Innovation heroes embarking
on this journey shoul