I’ve seen hundreds of design studios and innovation spaces within companies, incubators, and at universities in my travels. Some are staggeringly beautiful spaces but lacking in character and an inspiring, collaborative, engaging, and quite frankly fun culture. The bricks and mortar as well as whiteboard walls, open collaboration spaces, moveable furniture, etc. are important but they’re not as important as the culture of the place. And, that’s the focus of this post.
In addition to my global design role at IBM, focussed at present on our Global Academic Programs, I also have the honor of serving as the head of IBM Studios Canada with seven locations across the country. I’m really pleased with and proud of how the culture in our spaces has evolved over the past few years and I’d like to share some of the ingredients that I think really made and continue to make the difference. Each of our spaces is unique and, in turn, develops its own culture but these are some of the things we’ve found are helpful in fostering an awesome design studio culture in any space and I thought you may want to consider some or all of these if you haven’t already for your studio.
Some Simple Rules:
Hire the right people - Include members of your studio in the interview process and look for skills but also look for fit to the studio. Strive for diversity in all relevant forms: gender, age, race, life experience, etc.
Balance project and studio focus - A tension typically exists between focusing on the project work needing to be done and participating in studio activities. For a healthy studio culture, the leadership team needs to communicate to studio members that both are important. There may be times when the project work takes precedence but those times should be rare.
Encourage but don’t manage - A great culture cannot be mandated nor implemented by management. Leadership needs to encourage, support, and give license for studio members to propose and lead studio activities that they’d like to have.
Balance work with fun - While the work being done in the studio is important, it’s equally important for studio members to get to know each other better as people and to just relax and have a good time together.
Foster professional growth - The experiences members have in a studio should enhance their growth as professionals whether that is further honing their skills, gaining additional knowledge, working on different teams, or having career advancement.
Examples of Activities:
New employee experience - The first day on the job should be special. We try to ensure that the computer and other equipment the studio member will require is all ready for them, that the manager walks them through the studio to meet everyone individually, that studio leadership provides a personalized overview of the company and how the studio fits into the company, and the new studio member is asked to prepare an interesting and fun presentation at the next all studio meeting introducing themselves and talking about where they were born and grew up, what schools they went to, where they’ve worked, what their favorite things to do are outside of work, and some other fun things about themselves.
Personalizing the space - Some studios use a ‘hoteling’ model where employees are assigned desks for the day, others provide desks and personal workspaces on a more permanent basis. In our experience, the latter is far more helpful in fostering an awesome studio culture. People appreciate some predicability and stability in where they sit and they also love to personalize their space with plants, stickers, pictures, etc. Studios using the hoteling model, on the other hand, often feel stark and impersonal.
Show and Tell sessions - It’s good for studio members to share what they’re working on with other studio members. While some studios use formal critique sessions, I’ve noticed that simply giving designers the opportunity to informally share their work and ask for input if they want works much better. There’s less pressure and it ensures that everyone in the studio knows what others are working on and what challenges they’re having.
Workshopping enhancements - Designers in most studios I’ve visited use design thinking workshopping in their product or service design work. However, they don’t think to use those powerful methods to ensure that the studio space they’re working in is designed intentionally to suit their needs. We’ve found that workshopping studio enhancements not only ensures an optimal user focused space design, it also builds studio culture, belongingness, and pride knowing that the designers designed their own space.
Skill building opportunities - A studio shouldn’t just be a physical space to work. It should also explicitly foster skill building. We’ve found it helpful to either bring in an expert on a subject or more often in fact to share expertise that a member of the studio has with others in the studio.
Opportunities for career growth - In addition to acquiring new skills, studios also need to encourage and support career growth in the practice of those skills. This can be accomplished by encouraging staff to help with client workshops, run volunteer initiatives like STEM for Girls, STEAM for Kids, Bring your Kids to Work, onboarding and mentoring of new employees, coaching student capstone projects at universities, serving as a judge for university design competitions, moving from one team in the studio to another, and of course, being promoted to a higher level position.
Designing for social good - Skill development and career progression are important but so is giving permission and encouraging studio members to pursue designing for social good initiatives. Recent examples in our studios have included redesigning the recycling system used in our buildings to make it more effective and comprehensive and designing a design thinking education curriculum for elementary schools.
Birthday and vacation sharing - A studio has to have a lot of just having fun together. One great activity that several of our studios do is to celebrate all the birthdays for that month together including birthday hats, cake, and singing. After the birthday celebrations we transition to having studio members share pics and stories from any recent vacations or trips. These activities are hugely popular with the whole studio turning out for the event.
Snacks, lunches, & social outings - Keeping with the having fun theme, our locations now provide free snacks all day long. Groups of colleagues regularly go and have lunches together at nearby restaurants, particularly at your downtown studios. We also occasionally get together for meals with the whole studio team and for various outings to places like the movies, axe throwing, tree climbing, hiking. escape rooms, etc.
Celebrating significant holiday events - It’s great to celebrate significant holiday events with the whole studio, like halloween and the holiday season. The studio members decorate the whole place including themselves. Being talented designers, the halloween face painting and costumes are always out of this world amazing. One of our studios dressed up and played the roles of a murder mystery one year.
Multi-studio summit get togethers - My favorite time of the year is the IBM Canada Design Summit which brings together all seven locations together for two days. We’ve now held this Summit for the past four years and it’s the highlight of the year for us. We have keynote talks, one of which I give, guest speakers, a client panel, demos, skill building sessions, fun activities including a design focussed jeopardy game, and workshopping key challenges. This year we included students and faculty from local design schools and universities for the second day and together workshopped improving design education and industry-academia collaboration.
We spend a lot of our lives at work and I think its crucially important to make that time as enjoyable, productive, rewarding, stimulating, and fun as possible. We don’t profess to have all the answers but I hope our experience will provide you some ideas that you may not have tried in making your studio more awesome.
I’d like to thank the leaders and the entire staff for having done everything that I’ve shared in this post. You are, in fact, awesome!