workplace – The Consulting Artist

Studio Time : The New World of Work

Why stay at home when you can go to work?

Don’t panic – I’m not about to join the burgeoning ranks of scribblers currently pontificating on hybrid working, remote working, flexible working, and all that jazz. For now, I’m focussing on something much more out of vogue, the art of actually going to work to do your work.

As of June 1st 2021, I became the latest tenant at Oaks Park Studios, Carshalton. After carrying out most of my creative practice over the past decade on the kitchen table, on my desk, and with my eight legged coworkers in the spider filled garden shed, this is big news for me, and I expected it to be tiny news for anyone else. I was wrong about that.

After sharing a photo of my new working space on Instagram and Twitter last week, I’ve had loads of encouragement from people. There’s something lovely about knowing people are interested in your work. As a freelancer I feel that particularly keenly, and I’m grateful to everyone who has been in touch.

So why – when we are still in the grip of a global pandemic, would I choose to invest in a workplace, (particularly one with such basic facilities – I’m assured winter time with no heating is fun) when seemingly all around me, people appear to be abandoning theirs? Four things heavily influenced my decision.

Community

I’ll be working among a community of artists. This will be a new experience for me, and as someone who holds community at the heart of his practice, I am excited to see how these new exposures affect me and my work.

Proximity

The studio can be reached on foot. Crossing farm tracks and parklands, it is approximately one and a half miles away from our home. A lot of my work is influenced by wandering and wondering through local nature, and being able to travel to and from work on foot will doubtless play into how my work develops.

Space

For the first time in my artistic adventures, I have space to play. That canvas you can see on the easel in the above photo, measures 1m x 70cm. It felt huge at home, too big to work on in my little office, and it took up too much room in the kitchen. Now, as you can see, it looks tiny. Very simply, this bigger space gives me opportunities to take on bigger experiments. As an added bonus – I am creating space at home as I move my stuff into the new working space.

Percolation

One of the challenges in doing this kind of work from home, is the constant need to be tidying things away. I can’t leave work ‘in place’ as that place is nearly always needed for us to cook, eat, and live in. I’m really curious to learn how my work evolves when I can work on it day in day out, leaving it in place for as long as is needed.

What now? In the words of David Hockney, it’s time to Shut Up And Paint. More to follow…

Developing and Sustaining A Culture of Creativity

This is the beginning of a curation of some recent talks, projects and workshops on developing and sustaining a culture of creativity in the workplace. This space will grow into a mixture of words, pictures, and practice, and the first thing I want to share is a series of annotated images, which I used to support short talks at Workplace Trends and Clerkenwell Design Week. There were four talks in all, each one slightly different, yet similar enough that I hope this one set of notes covers all the main points.

In summary the talks focused on:

Scene setting : some evidence about why creativity at work is important
Reluctance : some thoughts on why we don’t use creative practice more readily
Getting started : A few ideas on how to bring business and the arts together
Creative prompts : Simple steps to spark and sustain the creative process
Age of Artists : An introduction to the evolving Age of Artists framework
The Free Art Project : Be curious, start something, keep going
Reading list
Thoughts on managing a creative culture : Taken from the book Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Here’s a link to all the details. Sustaining a Culture of Creativity. I hope you find them useful and if you’ve any questions – feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line.

More to follow…

Noise Annoys

I often hear noise being described as ‘unwanted sound’. As someone who grew up listening to a lot of punk music, I’m not sure it’s quite as simple as that. Sitting upstairs in my bedroom, I was frequently yelled at to turn off the noise noise noise, stop kicking up a racket, etc. This stuff wasn’t (and still isn’t) unwanted to me, and I readily accept it’s not everyone’s idea of good music.

Fortunately for you – I usually enjoy my music when I’m working alone, or with headphones on – so it needn’t trouble you, but what about the noise that’s not so easy to avoid? How does that affect you, particularly when you’re trying to work?

I met Paige Hodsman at the Workplace Trends conference last year. Paige works for Ecophon who specialise in acoustic solutions to improve the working environment, and we got to talking about how noise and sound affects your ability to be creative at work. After the event our conversation continued, and continued, until we decided to offer up an interactive workshop for people, to explore and experience how changes in the environment affect our ability and desire to be creative. That workshop is called The Art of Sound, and it takes place in Central London on June 7th. Would you like to come and take part? You can book a place here. It won’t cost you any money, and we’ll provide lunch and all the materials you’ll need. It would be lovely to see you.

Purely by chance, since Paige and I decided to run this session, I have come into contact with Chris Moriarty from Leesman, a company which gathers and shares all kinds of interesting data to help people understand their workplace performance. Chris has kindly shared some data with me which shows the extent to which people are concerned by noise at work, and how it impacts creative thinking and a host of other things besides. I’ve not had the data for long, and I can already see that of the 160,000 people who have currently responded to the Leesman Index survey, just over three quarters of them indicate that noise levels at work are important to them.

On average across the Index only 55.8% of people agree that the workplace enables them to be productive. However, when you look at those that have indicated that noise levels are important and they are happy with them, you see that number rise to 82.2% against those that are dissatisfied with noise down at 32.7%. A 49.5 percentage points difference.
Noise is also impacting enjoyment, this time there’s a 37.8 percentage points difference (78.2% satisfied vs 40.3% dissatisfied). These are big gaps. If we are to improve the workplace and make it more conducive to creative, and enjoyable working, then understanding this stuff is important, for people in workplace design and implementation, and for HR people too.

I can also see that noise is affecting many of the tasks we need to perform at work, and I’ll keep digging through what Chris has provided and share some more details at the event on June 7th. I hope to see you there, and until then, I’ll leave you with The Buzzcocks doing what they do best.