I was privileged to visit Unistress, a company in Lanesborough, MA run by Perri Petricca during a recent BBQ (Berkshire Business Quarterly) breakfast business meeting. Perri gave us a great talk about the business and then we all took a tour through the cavernous spaces where Unistress creates the pre-stressed concrete structures that are used all over the NorthEast for bridges and tunnels and parking garages.
It was great to hear Perri talk about how much design, creative thinking, and dynamic leadership matter to the success of his business. One doesn’t normally equate creativity with concrete, but there was every indication during the talk and the tour and meeting the managers that work at Unistress that it is a core value to the success of the organization.
In the last couple of years working on the executive committee of Berkshire Creative, I’ve had the pleasure of watching this idea of “creativity” taking root all over the region. Creativity is a great, fundamental concept to work with, as it shifts your thinking about what you do and how you approach it, giving you a free pass to consider alternate thinking and alternate solutions. I’ve been working on developing techniques to enhance and explore creativity in our work at the studio and we’re bringing some of those techniques out to our clients now, working in more of a consulting role than strictly as designers.
Creativity is a muscle. The more you work it, the stronger it gets.
