Pop Up Office by Format D

We have been regularly moving our workplace to different locations and organising Working-Out-Of-Office-Days in various formats for 8 years now. Over the years, we have already travelled as a team to Tuscany, Croatia, as part of our big outdoor coworking days with lots of inspiring people in the Bavarian Oberland and once to the IKEA furniture store.
 

But what was also new for us this year was an event that took place right in the heart of the city. As part of the Munich Creative Business Week, we moved our office to the Minna Thiel, a wonderful feel-good location with lots of fresh air and green space all around, which just screams creativity and community! We were joined by a colourful mix of interested and exciting people from a wide range of industries. Students, freelancers, designers, developers, new work coaches, alumni, friends and so on... All in all, it was a very fulfilling day with various topics, talks, Q&As, yoga and many other highlights. The event showed us once again how enriching it is to create a space for everyone where community building is the top priority.
 

Organised like a normal working day, there was of course enough space for everything that usually takes place in the office or home office: focused work, meetings and exchanges, workshops, joint coffee breaks, after-work drinks, etc.

As we do every year, we wanted to provide professional input for Munich Creative Business Week. We gave all participants an exclusive insight into our way of working and our internal culture in two talks over the course of the day.

This year's MCBW motto How To Co-Create With Nature couldn't be more fitting: As a digital studio, we regularly draw so much inspiration, creativity and motivation from working in the middle of nature, so we wanted to contribute to the theme with a deep insight into the motivations behind such a - yet still unusual - working practice.  Big topics such as New Work are always on everyone's lips and ultimately summarise the topic of our presentation under one roof. But we didn't want to sing the praises of how we work together. Instead, we wanted to explain to the audience what it means for us as Format D to constantly scrutinise familiar ways of working. Why it is important to actively design culture every day, to put people at the centre of daily creative practice and how this can result in a workplace that is geared towards the needs and goals of each employee was the core of this talk.

We always endeavour to share our know-how, which we have built up over the years through further development and the desire to innovate, with others in order to make a contribution to the creative community. We believe that through constant exchange and knowledge sharing, we can continue to develop and create products that move with the times. That's why, in the second talk, we took on a very nerdy topic and gave an insight into a creative process that we have long sworn by: The Design Sprint or - at Format D - the Key Sprint. In order to structure our creativity, keep it going and constantly inspire it, we use some of the methods known from design thinking and optimise them for our own needs. As a result, we have realised that - contrary to many popular opinions - it is not that difficult to be creative after all. You just have to find the right structure for you, give it space and time and be open to constantly developing it further.