<p>Every Friday at 5 p.m., 15 or so Foursquare engineers, designers, and researchers step away from their computers for mandatory art time. Each week, a different person proposes a creative exercise: Create an object that helps people deal with sorrow, or design the elevator control panel for a 1,000-story building, for example. The next few minutes are spent executing, and then the group shares their creations.</p><p>It might not look like it, but that hour-long session serves as the weekly meeting for the Product Experience team. Instead of discussing upcoming projects or administrative items, Jon Steinback, who heads up Product Design at Foursquare, finds it more useful to spend the hour imagining. "They all think about very narrow problems within the scope of Foursquare's larger questions," he told Fast Company. This, he hopes, gets people to think beyond their individual tasks and learn how to focus on problem solving in a different way.</p><p>For a group of intense, tech worker bees, their artistic skills aren't terrible. They've also come up with some pretty clever ideas. I know this because Steinback saves and hangs the creations around the Soho office.</p><p>One week's challenge, for example, was to think up a new Pebble watch that tells time using non-minute based units. One person made a sundial; another measured time in shots. Another week, everyone got a picture of an item around the office, a clear plastic film to put over it, and was asked to draw a new interface. Steinback got a photo of a urinal: "I made this massive carnival game with rows of ducks running by, and there's a meter at the top to show you how well you're doing, and you have to do well enough to get tickets to wash your hands in the end." Talk about a novel first-person shooter game.</p><p><a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3027051/most-creative-people/how-foursquares-wacky-friday-afternoon-art-hour-helps-employees-think-c">Keep reading...</a></p>