Business Intelligence: A Tree-mendous Workspace
January 04, 2007
From the Inside Training newsletter
By Margery Weinstein
You might commute home with leaves stuck to your work-appropriate slacks and the occasional twig in your hair, but Pittsburgh-based product design firm Davison Design and Development says working in a tree house is great for the imagination. The company, a provider of innovative designs for products such as toys and hardware tools, has found creative workspaces, like treehouses, the innards of a robot and a pirate's ship, refresh the brain. With a unique (to say the least) space for each of its divisions since the beginning of September, corporate headquarters is now known as "Inventionland."
"We wanted to build Inventionland to foster creativity, increase quality and productivity in our organization," says president and CEO George Davison. "When you think about putting a team of people inside a treehouse, nobody knows if that?s going to work. This was all a big R&D [research and development] experiment, but sooner or later, somebody had to try this is the way we looked at it."
The idea was getting workers inspired by placing them in an environment that tapped into positive feelings. The treehouse, housing the tool designers, was intended to help these employees remember the fun they had working on and inside their treehouses as children. Davison wanted them to regain that youthful sense of excitement about their work. "Our staff is happier than they've ever been, more creative than they have ever been," he says. "It is a fun environment, but they also get their work done."
The treehouse is actually an area composed of a few trees, the first of which is estimated by Davison to be about 20 feet in diameter with a tunnel carved into it that workers pass through on their way to the elevated "house." After they walk through the tunnel, featuring "inspirational sayings" on its insides, employees proceed across a bridge over water and up a staircase that circles around yet another tree, and leads to a deck that gets them into the approximately 15 foot-high elevated "office." "It's a state of the art IT'ed workspace," Davison says. There's peg board on walls, desks, brainstorming tables and flat screen computer monitors. If they get tired of working indoors, staffers can amble out to the tree house's porch, which overlooks a lake that includes a waterfall.
While a treehouse seemed ideal for the tool designers, the company felt those who concentrate on new toy concepts might be happier elsewhere. "The toy designers are fun-loving people. They have a lot of complex problems to solve with toy design and engineering," Davison says. For this challenge, the company decided to help them recall the fun some of them said they had as children, chasing their friends through the woods with a patch on their eye, playing pirate, he explains. The stationary ship, which sits on about 10 inches of water, was built to look as though it was shipwrecked into a rock face.
Meanwhile, consumer electronics designers are nestled inside a robot. "It looks like the upper chest and the head of a big silver robot that has big antenna ears and an electronic module with plasma electronic eyes that glow at you and a big robotic arm that looks like the robot is pulling itself up out of the concrete," Davison says. Inside of this creature is office space that's as efficient as that found in the treehouse or pirate ship. "Their happy spot is very forward thinking. They love robotics and electronics," he points out. "Robots all run by electronics, so they?re immersed and surrounded by electronics all day."
The company, which has tentative plans to team with a local university to quantify the effect of this unorthodox office space on its workforce, already counts the experiment a success. "Our people are most comfortable thinking outside the box," Davison says, "so we want to create a workspace for them that?s outside the box as well."
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