Up: [[Place]] Created: 2023-07-15 Updated: 2026-01-24 Our homes aren’t just settings for the pursuit of creative ventures, they can actually be set up to stimulate both creativity and thought. ### Furniture An experiment was devised where groups of students were going to be most successful if they collaborated with another group to solve a problem. The experimenters hadn’t taken the room’s furnishings into account and were surprised to find that two groups of students in a section of the room that had only chairs either put the chairs in a circle or shoved them aside and worked together on the floor. But the two groups of students that were in a section of the room with tables on casters, stayed at their group’s table and didn’t collaborate at all. Conclusion: Fluidity of space —> Fluidity of mind ### Lighting Put lights on a dimmer switch. Keep them low when you’re focused on idea generation; turn them up if you’re further into the creative process. ### Face Your Space You will be happiest and most able to do your best work if you’ve got a clear field of vision and your back is to a wall. It’s for the same reason that gangsters in movies sit in the corner of the restaurant facing the door and able to see everyone in the room. It’s in our DNA that we are more alert and aware of possible danger if we don’t have protection at our backs. ### Beautify Abraham Maslow did a study in the 1950s. He set up three spaces: - Beautiful room — Maslow’s office — large draped windows, soft lighting, a sculpture, comfortable chair, bookcase, mahogany desk, nice rug - Average room — neat, clean, but basic - Ugly room — a basement room set up like a janitor’s closet — dirty grey walls, straight-backed chairs, bare-bulb light fixture, torn shade, mops, box spring and mattress Students were taken into one of the three rooms and given a stack of black and white headshots. The task was to rank the anonymous faces on a numerical scale for “energy” and “well-being.” Although all students were given the same stack of photographs, students in the average and ugly rooms were noticeably more negative in their assessments. And, interestingly, so too were the proctors who had to take students to the ugly room. They complained and were irritable and fatigued by the job. Conclusion: Aesthetically appealing environment —> more energized in work and more positive about the world and ourselves In an updated version of this task, people rated paintings and music as beautiful, indifferent, or ugly then were put in fMRI machines to view and listen to those same pieces. Artworks judged as beautiful heighten activity in the medial orbito-frontal cortex, which is associated with positive, rewarding and emotional experiences. Ugly artworks fired up the amygdala and left somato-motor cortex, both of which are linked to fear, anger, and movement as if our brains are wanting us to flee. ### Objects and Images Keep in front of you the objects and images that remind you of who you are and what you value. These items will make you more motivated and more productive. More poetically and maybe a bit more urgently, [[Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi]] says *they tell us things about ourselves that we need to hear in order to keep our selves from falling apart.* (*The Extended Mind*, p.130) > [!user] Donald M. Rattner in *My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation*