Imaginative Visualizations: Enriching Women’s Workplace Skills

Abstract

The theme of this chapter is creative work practice and the role of visualizations in expressing, developing, detailing, communicating, and presenting an evolving piece of work. It is based on extensive fieldwork in an architectural office and on detailed accounts of work practice from early conceptualizations of a design to its implementation. It also makes use of some of the concepts and metaphors that researchers and architects co-developed in the course of their joint investigations for gaining a richer understanding of design practice and for talking about it with others.The chapter discusses some of the key features of creative work, introducing the notion of ‘open planning.’ Its focus is on skills such as mobilizing inspirational material and working with it, creating ‘persuasive artifacts’ and using space for story telling as a way of expressing context and open relationships.Exploring design practice and the power of visualization is done with a view to enriching women’s workplace skills. This was also the objective of a workshop held at ifu by the author.KeywordsOpen PlanningDesign WorkCreative WorkVisual MaterialVisual CultureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.