How Environment Can Boost Creativity

How Environment Can Boost Creativity
(Alexandre Normand, CC BY 2.0)
10/1/2014
Updated:
10/1/2014

Darkness and dim lighting can encourage freedom of thought, which leads to a more prolific generation of ideas, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. Specifically, dim lighting downplays a room’s distractions, promoting focus on internal reflection and the work at hand.

The next question is whether to keep that work on a tidy or a messy desk. While a writer in a time crunch might prefer a clean desk (reducing clutter can help people focus), one small study found that working amid disorder helped people come up with more creative ideas.

Kathleen D. Vohs, a professor at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management and the lead researcher of the study, writes, “Being creative is aided by breaking away from tradition, order, and convention and a disorderly environment seems to help people do just that.”

Evidence also supports the habits of people who eschew a desk altogether, instead opting to work in a coffee shop. A little bit of ambient noise (between 50 and 70 decibels—the average noise level of a coffee shop) slightly disrupts the mental process, which one study showed to help people engage in more abstract thinking during a word-association task.

This article was originally published on www.theatlantic.com. Read the complete article here.

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