Extreme Design Thinking

These days, good design is the product of group collaboration rather than a single individual. The focus has been put onto the creative process, on the prototypes and products rather than on which individual made them. Design thinking is a group effort; businesses are now encouraging different perspectives and ideas to come together from the beginning.

There is, among the newer businesses, a trend to encourage employee creativity through an interesting workplace. Because of the fact that many of these new companies have been founded by young workers, are staffed by young people, and geared toward producing items for a young market, these workplaces can, at extremes, often look more like grown-up playgrounds than everything else.

One such workspace is JMP Creative, a company located in Santa Ana, CA which develops products, publicity stunts, toys, etc. Their website states that they have “created promotional programs for hundreds of major motion pictures and entertainment properties.” Aside from their great range of capabilities, the extraordinary part of this company is the environment they create in. It is so amazing that it was in fact featured on Travel Channel’s “Extreme” series for being an extreme place to work.

Here are their cubicles:

http://jan.freedomblogging.com/tag/jmp-creative/

It’s a dizzying array of colors and images on the wall. It’s hard to imagine that so much would be conductive to any sane creativity but apparently it works for the employees because the action doesn’t stop there.

This:

http://jan.freedomblogging.com/tag/jmp-creative/

This is their conference room, designed into a flying saucer and decorated inside and out. It is lifted up to the top of the room, a walking space underneath it, simulating that the room actually is floating. They have another room which they call the “submarine think tank.” It’s the place where they get together and develop ideas but it is, as one might suspect, literally decorated up to be a submarine.

By taking the time to create a fun space, where employees are encouraged to play and goof off, those employees think of innovative new designs. This kind of environment really seems to work for these small yet multi-talented companies. Especially those companies focused somehow around entertainment or products geared toward children. It allows the designers to get into the right mindset, they become playful enough to get their imaginations working; deadlines would be softened by less pressure. To some, this sort of design firm might appear to have too much play and not enough work, but I think that if it stimulates the right sort of results, perhaps this is the new way to treat your employees. This sort of small and fun workplace is an appealing model, and may come to replace large corporations.