Research Design Connection: Design for Workplace Play
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 …
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