If you're looking for Bryan Judkins, you won't find him at his desk. 「I use it as a coat rack,」 he said of his work space at Young & Laramore, an advertising agency in Indianapolis, where he is the associate creative director. 「People see my coat and know I'm in the building.」

Exactly where in the building, however, is anybody's guess.

Mr. Judkins spends his day moving around the agency's offices, which are in a converted elementary school. The former gym, now filled with couches and tables, is a good place for creative thought, he said. There are hidden corners and crannies where no one can interrupt (best for writing).

What Mr. Judkins is doing is looking for 「white space,」 a term creeping into the language of work to describe a place where the actual work gets done. Desks suffice for answering phones and filling forms, but when it comes to the creative or introspective aspects of a job, desks can be uninspiring at best, or formidable obstacles at worst.

The term 「white space」 implies a place set apart, physically and mentally. Andy Hines, who studies the future of work at the Washington office of Social Technologies, a global consulting firm, said white space is 「what we are looking for when we have thinking to do.」

Mr. Hines often starts his lectures by asking his audience to name the place where they come up with their most creative ideas. The workplace, he said, is 「either not mentioned or is mentioned near the very end of the list, after all the other places have been exhausted.」 Mr. Hines, it should be noted, said he does his best work while running or reclining in his favorite chair.

Bosses can't help noticing that their workers are often away from their desks. And the hot idea in workplace design is providing space to think.

Technology companies are eliminating assigned space for open floor plans. Cisco Systems, Google and Sun Micro-systems have already knocked down partitions. In December, Intel began testing alternative floor plans at three locations – creating open work areas with clusters of armchairs, library-style tables with laptop plugs and a variety of conference rooms when privacy is needed.

Matthew Huber is an assistant professor at Purdue University in Indiana, where he creates computer models of past, present and future climates. He finds his white space every day at the Caf Vienna near campus, where he has all he needs in the form of a laptop equipped with Skype Internet service and a cellphone.

Dr. Huber said his caf offers something his office cannot: the very fact that it is not the office.

That, in the end, might be the ultimate purpose of white space: The choosing, the control.

「If I am to work all the time, then work is no longer a means to an end it is the end itself,」 Dr. Huber wrote in an e-mail message from the caf. 「So it had better be rewarding and it had better happen on my terms, not on anyone else's.」