Ever Noticed How Your Space Shapes Your Ideas?
Practical tips
Hi friend,
How are you? I hope you’re doing well.
If you follow my stories over the years, you’ve seen that I've covered various visual storytelling best practices, from story design to visuals and the latest tools.
These are all internal aspects of the craft.
But as you can imagine, the external work environment also plays a role in the quality of your creative ideas and stories.
Don’t just take my word, Research finds that physical workspace design is significantly linked to creativity and creative problem-solving capacity, with environments that support interaction and knowledge exchange driving better idea outcomes.
That means the right workspace can help your teams generate higher-quality ideas rather than just more of them.
The workspace, as you know, has undergone dramatic changes over the past five years, from a mandatory office presence to remote work during the pandemic, and now the move back to the office.
Reflecting on the new reality of going back to the office, the Wall Street Journal has recently asked its readers What office-design change would you most like to see?
The diversity of responses and ideas - including a guy who wanted a coffee-delivery drone for those long meetings - made me think about my experiences.
Sometimes all your team needs is the right set of tools to shine! If you’re looking for some inspiration. Explore my Storytelling Workshop
My office trail
I had the opportunity to try out all work environments.
My least favorite is the open-plan design.
At Nokia’s headquarters in White Plains, NY, the open plan design meant you worked shoulder-to-shoulder with colleagues.
This setup came with low-concentration, as people were constantly chatting on phones or talking to each other at desks.
Using a headset to block out the noise was common. But then your brain needs to split into two: music-listening and that performance report due by noon.
One level up is the shared office experience.
That was my experience working for IBM in Somers, NY. If you watched the TV series Severance, that was the kind of feel that the corporate office building had. Long, endless white corridors.
You can do your work, but another person is with you in the room. Better concentration and 1:1 social bonding.
At the top sits the private office, where you get both high focus and can control the level of social interaction. This type of workspace is optimized for top leadership but creates distance from your team.
During the pandemic, the remote home office emerged. This is where I’ve been working for the past decade. First, the upsides: I can definitely have max concentration in full privacy, accompanied by light jazz music. Yet, it’s prone to home distractions and low on social interaction.
I covered this when describing the backstory of creating this newsletter.
In short
The bottom line, each work environment has its upsides and downsides.
Office environments are high on social interactions but low on concentration levels. The corner private office is high on both, but is fading out due to the alienation effect.
Take Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who is known to work at a desk like a junior employee in an open-plan design.
The home office allows you to max your concentration (granted, there might be kids and pets demanding attention), but you often don’t see people unless you have outside meetings. Zoom calls are nice, but are no replacement.
The middle ground has been the hybrid model, where you report to the office a couple of days a week and the rest work from home.
But it also offers a mixed bag of benefits and challenges.
Hybrid work offers flexibility, productivity, and broader talent access, but can create coordination challenges, visibility bias, and culture gaps if not intentionally designed.
Over to you!
What workspace helps you do your best work today—and what would make it even better?
Feel free to drop your experiences below. You’ll be surprised to learn that what you may consider trivial, for someone else it could be a light bulb moment.
See you next time!
Best,
- Shlomi
Shlomi Ron
Founder, Visual Storytelling Institute
story > visual > emotion > experience
shlomi@visualstorytell.com
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