Design for enabling bottom-up creative thinking in organisations through shaping the workplace

The role of the working environment on the wellbeing of employees and on companies’ performances has been analysed and studied. It is noticed that a good workplace could actively support employees to be active, motivated and collaborative. But, how to shape the workplace through balancing the needs from employees and the company still remains open. Is there an approach that could guide this explorative investigation? Nowadays, companies are increasingly applying design (thinking), as an effective problem-solving method, to dealing with internal and external issues, and studies in this realm have started to pay attention to the employee’s engagement in organisational change and development. Therefore, considering the workplace as an touchpoint of the organisation, this paper aims at understanding the relations between workplace and design thinking practice in organisations: how they interact with each other and how employees could benefit from their interplay? From interviewing companies from different sectors, the research has identified four initial findings, illustrating the workplace and design thinking implementations could collaboratively foster an innovation culture in the organisation.