This track explores the intersection between organizational aesthetics and knowledge management (KM), framing aesthetic dimensions of organizational life – embodied, spatial, and symbolic – as infrastructures of knowing that shape how organizations learn, create, and share knowledge. Aesthetic elements such as architecture, interior and spatial layout, dress codes, and digital workplace design function as epistemic infrastructures that influence how people interact, and how knowledge flows across boundaries.

Building on several studies in organizational aesthetics (Taylor, 2005; De Molli, 2019; Baldessarelli, 2022; Raadik, 2025; Sastre & Yela Aránega, 2023), we argue that the sensory and affective dimensions of organizing are not peripheral embellishments, but central epistemic resources that underpin organizational cognition and performance. Aesthetics constitute a mode of knowing that extends beyond words and cognitive schemas (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007). Through visual, spatial, and embodied cues—such as atmosphere, materiality, and digital interfaces—organizations construct aesthetic knowledge that operates both symbolically and experientially. As Strati (1992; 2013) suggests, this aesthetic dimension enables scholars and practitioners to access tacit, sensory, and emotional forms of knowledge that are often hidden within rational–instrumental accounts.

Recent evidence also highlights the material and organizational implications of aesthetics. Workplace aesthetics can deliver utility comparable to salary and working hours in job choice (Ronda & de Gracia, 2022), influencing attraction and retention of key knowledge carriers (Lievens & Highhouse, 2003; Dale, 2005). Classic and contemporary KM research demonstrates how aesthetic and servicescape cues create ba, shared contexts that facilitate knowledge conversion (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Nonaka & Konno, 1998), improve trust, findability, and reuse in digital environments (Davenport & Prusak, 1998; Alavi & Leidner, 2001), and shape social affordances that enable informal exchange (Fayard & Weeks, 2014; Spence et al., 2014).

By connecting these streams, the track positions organizational aesthetics as a knowledge infrastructure that integrates physical, social, and digital environments. We invite conceptual, empirical, and methodological papers that examine how sensory infrastructures, aesthetic reflexivity, and material design contribute to knowledge creation, sharing, retention, and application (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990; Argote, 2012), ultimately supporting organizational learning, creativity, and innovation.
Topics of Interest (include but not limited to):

• Aesthetic knowledge: How sensory, spatial, and affective dimensions constitute alternative epistemologies of organizing.
• Aesthetics & KM outcomes: Links between physical/digital design and knowledge creation, reuse, time-to-productivity, and innovation throughput.
• Spaces and knowledge infrastructures: The role of architecture, spatial layout, and material aesthetics in enabling collective sensemaking.
• Attraction & retention as KM levers: How aesthetic cues signal culture and person–organization fit to attract and retain knowledge carriers.
• Servicescapes & affordances: Light, acoustics, adjacencies, and dress norms as enablers of tacit knowledge exchange and psychological safety.
• Digital aesthetics for KM: UI/UX, visual hierarchy, and interface design in wikis, portals, and analytics that enhance findability and reuse.
• Aesthetic reflexivity and organizational learning: Reflexive practices as drivers of creativity and epistemic renewal.
• Methodologies of aesthetic inquiry: Metrics, experiments, ethnography, and participatory interpretation for assessing knowledge effects of design.
• Equity, ethics, and inclusion: Inclusive aesthetics, hybrid work, and the distributional consequences for knowledge participation.
• Negative results & replication: Design interventions that failed to improve KM—and the lessons they reveal.