Alexandersson and Kalonaityte studied images of high-visibility offices online to identify patterns in the design of workplaces categorized as “playful” or encouraging play. They found that playful offices included design elements consistent with the outdoors or home or nightlife or childhood or a combination of these four place types/concepts.
“Outdoors” was the most common theme in playful offices and playful outdoors-related spaces included greenery of some sort, three-dimensionally or in two-dimensional images. Some of the “outdoor” areas included items found on playgrounds, such as slides that stretched between two floors of an office. Home was “represented in a very particular way, through the arrangement of sofas, armchairs and coffee tables imitating a living room…the temporalities these living rooms allude to are those of evenings, nights and weekends.” In spaces linked to nightlife “imitating restaurants, bars, nightclubs, inns and diners” was important. Childhood was evoked, for example, “through the use of the amusement park theme. Amusement park offices stand out as the most carefully crafted, and, in many cases, as encapsulating the entire office building.”
Anna Alexandersson and Viktorija Kalonaityte. 2018. “Playing to Dissent: The Aesthetics and Politics of Playful Office Design.” Organization Studies, vol. 39, no. 203, pp. 297-317, DOI: 10.1177/0170840617717545
Sally Augustin, PhD,a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.