Can Workplace Design enhance creativity and adaptation to change?

Our work examines the role of workplace design as an enabler of creative innovative work. We assume that competitive pressures to innovate and adapt to changes create a stressful reality accompanied by negative emotions for many employees. We argue that while such emotions have to be managed in order to achieve organizational goals, management often fails to provide effective and satisfactory solutions in this area. We therefore ask if workplace design can enable this ‘emotion management’ challenge and consequently enhance creativity and adaptation to change. Building on the design literature that sees design as tasked with creating contexts for positive experiences we offer a preliminary insight into the ways by which workplace design can generate such context acting as a persuasive artifact that invites people to engage by stimulating their interest and imagination and facilitating and accommodating their contributions. More specifically, we examine the potency of color as a design lever to eliciting desired individual emotions. While we peel off the outer layer of the ‘design as a creator of context for positive experience’ phenomenon, we conclude that additional research is needed to further reinforce the notion of design as a creator of desired context for experience and identify the means and levers by which such aim is achieved