Restorative Reminders
How to Put Creativity Back Into Our Dying Work Culture?
- Anugrah
SPACE10 was formed in 2014.
SPACE10, Denmark. Image Via: Dezeen.com
The job of SPACE10 was to curiously and creatively imagine the future realities for IKEA. Not what IKEA can be in future as a business but what IKEA can be to the world in future. They “set out to create a space where people and ideas could meet and interact.”
They say, “Our working methods prioritised collaboration over competition,…always tried to approach our work in playful and experimental ways and let the power of storytelling and imagination take root in everything we did.”
SPACE10, New Delhi. Image Via: Archdaily.com
SPACE10 was able to bring innovation initiatives, curiosity and creativity into the company’s work culture, not just to the fringes.
Still, a decade later (August 2023) SPACE10 pulled their shutters down.
(Why and how is another story for another day.)
………………
Nevertheless, SPACE10 showed us that we can have a creative culture to hone our work environments in all the pleasing ways. Our jobs, our business, and our lives are not solely a pursuit of fiscal growth, growth in numbers, or grades or paychecks. These are inevitably important but are never implied to be crazily spearheading our lives.
Even then, if you find your lives entangled in this humungous world’s-grinding-work-culture, I will not blame you, even if, your creative optimism has developed deep stretch marks, from the constant stretches and shrinkage.
In some way, as much as you and I are vitamin D-deprived, we are also deprived of curiosity and creativity. Because in or around the year 2020, our human world changed again! We were compelled from a workplace culture to a remote work culture (aka post-covid-era). Cloistered working in our hovels highly deficient of meaningful human connections!
Technology has held human hands, this time more tightly clasped.
What SPACE10 did to a large company we can do the same in our small lives – become curious and creative, make it our living culture.
We may be able to impact the work culture too.
“what you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis
Further Reading: How are we even Curious?
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