When I was in primary school, there was a special family event that I remember very well — once or twice a year we would take the bus into downtown Cleveland (USA) to go to lunch with my dad. Often, we would meet him at his office and while I was, of course, interested to see if my artwork from school was on display, I was just as interested in the things he had in his office that I didn’t recognise: trinkets from places he had been, pictures of him and my mum — the things that gave me a picture of who he was at work.
Perhaps this little story will remind you of times you’ve been in a friend’s or parent’s workspace or taken a look around at a receptionist’s desk and noticed personal items on display. In a sense, it seems very natural that we would decorate these spaces. But, at the same time, these spaces are institutional and belong to the organisation, so people are decorating spaces that are only nominally ‘theirs’. So, why make the effort? Why make decisions about what to display and what not to? What purpose could all of this ‘stuff ’ serve? These are some questions I will aim to answer in what follows.
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