The future of creative workspaces : how organizational spaces influence creative work

Creativity has become an essential skill in today's competitive business environment, leading to the expansion of the notion of "creative workspace" beyond traditionally creative industries. Despite growing managerial interest in creating organizational spaces that support creativity and innovation, little is known about how these spaces affect and are affected by creative work. In this dissertation, I examine creativity and its underlying processes of collaboration and learning by foregrounding the effects of work environment. The first study is a qualitative study in makerspaces - shared workspaces with communal resources - investigating how developing creative projects in a space shared with other independent creators influence creators' experiences and their projects. I theorize the ways in which the copresence of multiple independent creative processes affects the creators' perceptions of themselves and their work, and, consequently, the collective experience in the makerspace. The second study focuses on how organizations use spaces to harness their members' personal interests for creativity, innovation, and learning. Based on a qualitative investigation at two design agencies, I uncover two distinct ways organizations and their members co-create spaces for exploration and play by negotiating their diverging needs and interests. In the final chapter, I review and synthesize research on physical space and creative work and propose an agenda for future research on creative workspaces.