The Frog Force (and Qryo – thanks guys!) spent Chinese New Year turning the office into The Jungle.
Over the next 3 months, the JFDI startups will make this place their own. By the end of the 100 days, there will be an infinite number of toy frogs, a few posters from the oatmeal, the remains of crazy hacks, and a dried slice of mouldy pizza.
Why did we go to such great effort to reorganize and decorate the space?
Research and experience taught us that simple hacks to a workplace can change how you work, play, and feel.
The Harvard Business Review Blog suggested we bring in some foliage. Plants help you concentrate, especially ones with rounded leaves (spiky leaves stab you in the eye.) The extra oxygen will be a welcome addition. Also, we’re tree frogs and it’s our natural habitat.
Plants also make the space green, which according to the interwebs soothes, calms, and relaxes our bodies and spirits.
Another resource for us was A Pattern Language, the ultimate book of architecture & design geekery. This 1,000+ page behemoth was published in 1977 and remains a best-seller. Here is some of the advice we followed:
Pattern 149: Have you ever walked into a public building and been processed by the receptionist as if you were a package?
Yes. We hope you don’t feel like a package walking into this:
Pattern 252: Uniform illumination—the sweetheart of the lighting engineers—serves no useful purpose whatsoever. In fact, it destroys the social nature of space.
Hence, no fluorescent lights during work hours. Instead, we have welcomed the following Swedish sensations to JFDI: EKÅS, HEMMA, TROGSTA, HOLMÖand TERTIAL. In addition, we’ll have added glow from 50+ monitors & laptops.
Pattern 132: Long, sterile corridors set the scene for everything bad about modern architecture.
Pattern 148: Break institutions into small, spatially identifiable work groups, with less than half a dozen people in each. Arrange these work groups so that each person is in at least partial view of the other members of his own group.
Meng spent hours planning the space in Adobe Illustrator, to ensure that each startup had its own positive workspace but that the full space fostered a community .
Each startup has its own workspace separated by plant dividers, whiteboards, and ambient columns. We also added carpet to high traffic areas. Don’t leave the path, or you will be eaten by a grue.
The HBR Blog had another suggestion: Tell Your Own Story. With that, we hand the space over to the startups tomorrow on Day 1 of the JFDI–Innov8 2012 Bootcamp. They will make it their own.