Name: JANE ROSA MARTINS
Publication date: 25/11/2025
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ALEXANDRE REIS ROSA | Examinador Interno |
| CESAR AUGUSTO TURETA DE MORAIS | Presidente |
| JOSÉ EDEMIR DA SILVA ANJO | Examinador Externo |
Summary: Organizational creativity has been widely discussed in recent years, especially in the face of
increasingly competitive and challenging markets. In the public banking sector, this scenario is
intensified by demands for innovation, performance pressure, and transformations in physical
workspaces. Given the need for environments that stimulate employee creativity, the strategic role
of interior design stands out in shaping spaces that are collaborative, pleasant, and sensorially
engaging. To achieve this, the multisensory experience and refined aesthetic judgment of the
professionals responsible for interior design are essential, as they are influenced by organizational,
cultural, and aesthetic factors. The challenge faced by these professionals becomes even greater
when designing for the complex context of a public bank, where the design must simultaneously
address institutional and governmental interests as well as the needs of users — which are often
contradictory. The project team investigated in this study, composed of tenured bank employees,
has the particular characteristic of being internalized within the institution, which directly influences
the creation of interior design projects. This prolonged experience within the organizational context,
combined with their direct interaction with the spaces they design — as creators influenced by their
own creation — contributes to more assertive and sensitive solutions. The objective of this research
was to understand how the creative process unfolds in interior design developed by an internalized
project team within a public bank. To this end, the investigation articulated the theoretical approaches
of distributed creativity and organizational aesthetics, adopting a qualitative methodology based on
participant observation, semi-structured interviews, analysis of institutional documents, photographic
records, and content analysis techniques applied to all collected material. The study focused on the
creative process within administrative offices, recognizing their strategic relevance and the scarcity
of academic research on their design. The results reveal that the team’s creative process goes
beyond the technical application of design solutions, emerging as a collective, relational, and
sensitive phenomenon, influenced by multisensory experiences, material artifacts, and symbolic ties
to the institutional environment. The covid-19 pandemic further highlighted the importance of
aesthetic experience as a sensitive language that communicates care, safety, and belonging. This
research contributes to the theoretical field by demonstrating the benefits of articulating distributed
creativity and organizational aesthetics, and to the practical field by offering insights for public
institutions, traditional banks, and credit cooperatives to rethink their strategies for fostering creativity
in the workplace — recognizing the strategic value of aesthetic knowledge and the importance of
actively listening to users.
