design portamento

being creative: does your design space matter?

When I started at Dealix last spring one of the first things I wrestled with was not having acreative space. At that point in my life I shared the belief that you didn't really need a bunch of tools or a certain environment to be creative -- you just needed good ideas. In other words, I was fairly convinced that a work environment didn't really lend much to my design process. I was so wrong!

Upon arriving at Dealix, after almost two years at Yahoo!, I was struck by how quiet and subdued the environment was. I felt like I was working in a library and I really missed being surrounded by purple! But you see, Dealix had never had a User Experience person on board before I joined. I doubt if anyone had ever really thought about needing a "space to create". But I soon realized that that's exactly what Dealix and I needed!



Long story short, my Manager gave me a conference room to work with and a budget of about $700. I moved the boring old corporate furniture out and put in new furniture from IKEA. I kept one wall covered with white boards and left the other main wall completely blank. I bought a high table so that people could comfortably stand around it to look at mock-ups etc. There are also chairs and a couch in the space as well as a bookshelf/wall unit for storage.

Now you're probably wondering how the new space affected my creativity - right? I'll write about that in my next post.

Labels: creative space, creativity

posted by kaari @ 3:37 PM