Facilities Planning for a Creative Company

Abstract

Facilities planning tools have been used by project managers for planning industry spaces for decades now, but applications in creative organizations are still sparse. This happens mainly because of a gap that exists between engineering and psychology fields, with the first developing planning tools for production but with little concern for creativity and the other developing spaces for creativity, but with a lack of tools. Both try to solve the same issue: fostering productivity in the workplace, but they need to be linked first, in order to accomplish it. How to close this gap? Can a project manager plan the facilities for a creative organizational in the best way possible? In this paper, a new approach is used for studying the design of physical environments that foster organizational creativity, combining the results of psychological studies on the impact of physical environment on creativity with the facilities planning body of knowledge applied by industrial engineers. In order to test the results, a single case study is developed in a small IT consulting firm. By using the systematic layout planning (SLP) step by step process, it is shown that by acting on the work environment of the company, the developers creative processes can be boosted and facilitated. It is also shown that both industrial engineering and creativity research have much to contribute to each other and future research topics in the field are presented.