KRISTINA ZANIC reflects on creative economies and their influence on workplace design today

Over the past decade, we have witnessed first-hand – in both our own operations and our clients’ businesses – the profound lifestyle changes propelled by globalisation and connectivity through technology. Patterns of consumer behavior in the choice of products and services have changed on a fast-paced basis, with more entrepreneurial designer-orientated creative industries. The upside of the current economic downturn has seen big business invest in these creative growth industries to form long-term sustainable businesses.

At dwp, we support and promote this new emerging creative economies paradigm from corporations to smaller entrepreneurial creative clusters – manifested through our material selections and design choices to accommodate a more inclusive human quality.

When I first started out as a designer over 20 years ago, corporate space-planning requirements were to include as many seats as possible, within a pleasing environment, minimising ‘unproductive-space’ for staff facilities. The pay-back for staff was to work for a big company which would sustain their employment for a lifetime. The success of this industrial-age business model was to standardise relationships with people and not waste resources treating each employee or consumer as a different individual, but only to understand people en-masse. The need for human creativity was dormant.

What we are seeing now is staff dictating lifestyle choices in more conducive ‘hospitality’-type collaborative community-environments with comfortable break-out/brainstorming areas, hot-desking, libraries, kitchenette hubs, virtual offices and even child-care facilities. Our current corporate clients, many of them entrepreneurial creative companies, are delivering new exciting workplaces reflecting today’s new economy.

The term creative economies is based on industries involved in commercial business activities that make original and valuable ideas their primary objective. Collectively, members of the new creative economy have a high level of skill in the cultural, fine, or applied arts on the global stage. Digital advertising, architecture, art, crafts, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, research and development (R&D), software, toys and games, TV and radio and video games form these industries. In most countries they rely on strong human input.

Whilst cottage industries in say Cambodia and Bangladesh do not currently surpass traditional manufacturing output, government-backed incentives have succeeded in Thailand’s green-eco fibres, Vietnam’s ceramics and lacquer wares, Indonesia’s bamboo construction materials, Hong Kong’s West Kowloon creative precinct, Australia’s Idea events, and of course in the grand scale of Abu Dhabi’s futuristic technology/creative tourism islands.

These new creative economies can only exist with government initiatives of effective public policies and financial incentives. Private-sector investment and export-led technology confidently enable individuals and communities to explore creative ideas and to leverage new unique products and services that hold a cultural ‘point-of-difference’.

Just as the industrial age replaced the agricultural age, so too the industrial age is being replaced by the age of ideas and meanings produced by the imagination and supported by futuristic technology.

The inclusive mandate of new creative economies is that technology, sciences, economic trade, cultural production, and social platforms – in both developed and new emerging economies – must embrace cultural diversity, social inclusion and human development.

Kristina Zanic is the executive director-founder of dwp, an award winning global design firm specialising in master planning, architecture and interior design, with 13 offices in 10 countries and more than 380 multi-cultural staff.