Idea Lab: Season 1 wrapped up this week. Housed snugly in Source DC’s conference room, each session worked through a different topic. The first session investigated thinking spaces.

Any space can be a thinking space, but thinking spaces are areas intended for thinking and creativity. Meeting rooms, workshops, laboratories, and artist studios are great thinking-space examples. These spaces are intended to shelter particular kinds of communication and creativity. The laboratory, workshop, and artist studio are usually well-suited to the mental and physical tasks of their inhabitants. Meeting rooms and collaboration areas in offices are usually dismal failures.

Offices are usually designed with command and control in mind. Areas where people come together usually have a dissemination locus with various reception fields. Most commonly, the dissemination locus is at the end of a long, rectangular table and just in front of a whiteboard or screen. The reception areas are pretty much everywhere else with a chair. You can find the dissemination locus by walking into a conference room and asking, “Where would the boss sit?”

This basic design problem, the dissemination-reception problem, affects the thinking that the space promotes, the nature of the ideas expressed, and how people respond to ideas. The dissemination-reception problem’s nuances are different for different groups, but one strategy that goes a long way is expanding the dissemination locus.

The dissemination locus can be expanded by:

1. Using modular furniture. Ditch the big rectangle for smaller tables that can be wheeled around or removed entirely. The room can then be reconfigured to match the ideas: classroom, small groups, round table, etc.

2. Whiteboard everywhere. There’s no point in having a surface in a meeting room (or office for that matter) that you can’t write on or easily post ideas on. Design firms know this. Our large corporate clients often do not. Wall-to-wall magnetic whiteboard costs a little more to build and maintain, but the ideas people create and share will pay for the investment. Plus, you’re paying for those walls, shouldn’t they be working for you.

These two solutions, along with an abundant supply of paper, pens, sticky notes, markers go a long way to making an office meeting room a real thinking space. Add a little collaboration and communication training, and people can fully escape the dissemination-reception trap.