Space for Creative Thinking: Design Principles for Work and Learning Environments

•Guiding principles for designing new work and learning environments, with the aim of enhancing and stimulating creativity
•Twenty outstanding and wide-ranging examples, from offices and schools to research facilities
•Interviews with the designers and users of these 'creative spaces' reveal their functionality in practice

Businesses and schools today are looking for ways to spur the kind of creative thinking that leads employees and students to generate innovative ideas. Many are finding that the physical spaces in which people work and learn can provide a strong impetus to follow a creative train of thought.

Space for Creative Thinking puts this trend into the knowledge-work context, discussing the underlying design concepts that factor into making a space that stimulates original thinking. The book follows this outline of theory with twenty compelling examples, which range from offices and schools to research facilities. Each case study is presented through photographs, as well as interviews with both designers and users. It concludes with a brief set of guiding principles for designing spaces that capture the essence of a Creative Thinking Space.

Christine E. Kohlert is an architect, urban planner, and managing director at RBS Group/Drees & Sommer in Munich. She teaches at several universities, leads a team of design consultants that focuses on working and learning environments, and does research with Fraunhofer and other institutions. Scott M. Cooper is a writer and research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). He works closely with designers, architects, and social scientists on a wide variety of projects related to digital technologies, space, and the future of work and learning.