Creative Spaces

Since most of us are now working from home I thought it may be useful to let you in on some of the scientific and anecdotal evidence about how spaces affect us and our creativity.

For this blog, I am deeply indebted to architect Donald Rattner.

Throughout history, we have known that our environments affect our ability function and to be able to think creatively and functionally. Colour, light, views, sound, atmosphere, and the like, all have a profound effect on how we feel and therefore how we function and our creativity. Our surroundings affect our wellbeing and as a result our attitude and the effort we are willing to apply.

Let me start with a quick definition of creativity and Innovation.

Creativity is the development of novel and useful ideas for products, services or systems that have value to someone else. So not just art and design.

Innovation is the introduction of seminal ideas for products, services and systems into the world. i.e. online education.

“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us”

Winston Churchill

When we shape our building, we mean we fashion the intent of how we want people to feel. In other words, designers and architects (you could read here anyone who has an idea) think into the future to try to manipulate how people will feel when they enter or use the building. When people enter or use the building, the building or environment makes them feel and behave in a specific way.

This view is backed by environmental psychology which studies how the build or natural environment affects how we think, feel and act. Person to place study.

In 1984, Roger S Ulrich, studied the relationship of surroundings to experience by looking into patient recovery in Paoli Hospital. The subjects were all in similar rooms with the only difference being that some had windows that looked out to trees and the others looked onto a brick wall. What Ulrich observed was that those patients who had views of green leaves rather than brick walls recovered sooner, had fewer complications and needed less medication than those who had faced the brick walls. Ulrich realised that something external to the patients, their environment had a measurable effect on their physiognomy.

This is called “brain priming” where the input or stimulus, in this case, the view, triggers an output which changes not only the mental wellbeing but the physical wellbeing also.

Everything that happened, happened by “design”, i.e. by human agency and intent. So, if one thing affects human physiology, like the view of trees, can this also be true of other elements in the designer’s toolbox?

The answer is of course yes! And this became the development of what is called EBD, evidence-based design, which is used extensively in healthcare, which looks at the evidence of how what we create affects how we think, feel and act.

COLOUR.

So, it’s possible to see a connection between elements of the physical environment and improvements in wellbeing. Does it matter what colours we see?

In 2009, Zhu and Mehta of the University of British Columbia carried out a study to measure two styles of thinking, Analytical and Creative.

Analytical thinking may be characterised as reason and logic, linear, concrete and detailed, narrow and focussed, single solution, outward-looking and objective.In other words, “what is”.

Creative thinking may be characterised as almost the opposite; intuitive and insightful, meandering, abstract and non-specific, broad picture, multiple solutions, inward and subjective, “what could be”.

What they did was to give the test group various tasks which were on paper with either a Blue, a Red or a White border on it. The white border acted as a “control group”. The tasks were the same in all three.

What they found was that those tasks which had had a blue border engendered more creative answers than those with a red border, which performed better where analysis and logic were required. This is useful when deciding, for instance, what colour to paint your brainstorming space.

This shows the effect of “priming” the brain. As Rattner says “our mental (idea) space expands and contracts in direct proportion to our perception of physical space”. The more open and expansive we perceive our space to be, the more open we are to new ideas. Conversely, the more constrained we perceive our space the narrower our thinking and focus, the more analytical.

Colour is often used to convey the depth of space. Blue for distant depth and space, warmer for mid special areas, the warmest tones for things nearby. Blue seems to recede whereas red comes toward us. as in nature.

In 2006 Shashi Caan ran an experiment at a Design Trade show in New York colourized event tents to study how people behaved when saturated by colour (there was a similar installation in Shepherd Bush, London in 1976 and recently at the Royal Academy). In the blue tent people tended to gather towards the perimeter of the tent in groups of ones and twos as if being pulled outwards, in the red tent people tended to converge towards the centre of the tent as if the walls were pushing them in.

SPACE AND VOLUME.

The sensation of space and volume also has a measurable effect on people’s behaviour. In 2010 McCoy and Evans conducted an experiment where they got students (it’s always students) to take an exam in a room with a high ceiling and a low, suspended ceiling. The perception of 3D volume affected that those who were in the high ceiling, they performed better on the creative tasks, whereas those who were in the lower ceiling room performed better on the analytical tasks.

This holds also for spaces that have a view to the outside as opposed to no view. Rooms with a view were better for creative pursuits than those with no view. This further confirms the connection between perceived mental space and physical space.

Of course, this can also be achieved by hanging artworks which also create the perception of space. The brain reacts similarly to both the real view (although slightly better) as to the perceived view. Researchers, Liberman et A. (2011) and Ulrich et al. (2007).

Construal level theory, CLT, developed by Trope (2007), states that the farther away a person construes an object or event, the more abstract they will understand it to be. The closer, the more focussed.

We tend to see a pattern where detail is less evident. The difference between analytical thinking and creative thinking. If you want to think creatively you need to think (and view) more broadly and more abstractly. For analytical thinking, you need detail.

LIGHTING AND SOUND

Whilst less tangible than physical space lighting nevertheless has a powerful effect on our feelings of wellbeing and behaviour. Optimum levels of lighting are essential primes for each specific task and mode of thinking. So, does lighting influence creative thinking, and if it does, what level of lighting is best for ideation?

150 lux is the right amount for creative thinking. If you consider that 300 lux is optimum for reading, 500 for office space, 1000 for a supermarket. An overcast day will be roughly 10,000 lux and a sunny day could be 100,000 lux. So, why should such low levels of lighting be conducive to creativity?

The thinking behind this is that brightness of illumination focusses attention. For instance, if you wanted to repair a watch you would normally add extra light so that you could see the fine detail. Thus focussed, analytical vision, not possible at 150 lux. The brain switches from focussed attention to de-focused attention. i.e. broader more generalised and internal reflection.

This could also be due to something called “Locus of Control”. The feeling of having or being in control. Not being under the scrutiny of someone or something else, under the spotlight. Lower levels of light encourage freedom and to deviate from the norm without scrutiny.

Daylight Colour temperature changes throughout the day from warm tones to harder cooler tones in the middle of the day to warmer tones during the evening. This sequence is known as the Circadian cycle (Abdullah et al. 2016) controls a lot of our natural body rhythms from muscle strength, energy levels, to sleep/wake patterns and our creativity.

If you recall the earlier study on colour, it identified blue as the colour that is best for creativity. And that’s what studies have shown; we are at our creative peak when the light outside is I the blue range. So, most of us would be at our most creative during the late morning to early afternoon.

This is why the light in offices and our screens have been shown to throw out our biorhythms and disrupt sleep patterns.

NOISE.

Noise levels similarly have optimum levels for creativity according to Mehta, Zhu & Cheema (2012). 70 decibels are roughly the noise level of an average coffee shop, which may explain why so many people find it productive to work in a cafe environment. However, the noise needs to contain some white noise.

If we know how people behave and how they react to different stimuli we can arrange and design our spaces to optimise the environment.

Our working environments are only one of the many elements, albeit an important element, that can engender creative thinking. We shouldn’t forget though, that thinking creatively is an attitude, a mindset and a way of looking at the world.

But there’s no reason that you shouldn’t get as many other elements working in your favour to put you in a place where creative thinking can happen.