“How Does Working Alone Together Feel?” Aesthetic Ways of Knowing and Creating Knowledge in an Open Concept Office

Abstract

The trend toward open concept office floor plans reflects evolving management styles in modern organizations. Organizations typically implement architecturally open workspace designs to seed cultural change. As the popularity of open concept offices grows, however, research suggests that they are negatively impacting collaboration and productivity. This thesis examines how organizational leadership and employees perceive the transition to an open concept workspace, incorporating employees’ aesthetic experience to understand how the space is ‘physically known’. The study takes place within a conceptual framework of aesthetic knowledge as experiential, symbolic and personal. Using a qualitative, practice-based approach that incorporates participant-led photo-ethnography, semi-structured interviews were conducted with leadership and employees. Although the results are not generalizable, they suggest that the open concept workspace both positively and negatively impacts organizational collaboration but has primarily negative effects on staff productivity, and that leadership can improve open workspace outcomes by taking employees’ embodied experiences into account in the design and implementation of such spaces. The results add to our understanding of the way in which organizational strategy and aesthetic knowledge create and sustain the way of working within an open concept office space.