Your room affects your innovation capacity

Read an interesting article on the Scientific American website about hor our room designs can affect our work. The complete article is available through this link.

Here is what struck me (mostly experiment results). First, ample space:

(…) randomly assigned 100 people to a room with either an eight- or 10-foot ceiling and asked participants to group sports from a 10-item list into categories of their own choice. The people who completed the task in the room with taller ceilings came up with more abstract categories, such as “challenging” sports or sports they would like to play, than did those in rooms with shorter ceilings, who offered more concrete groupings, such as the number of participants on a team. “Ceiling height affects the way you process information,” Meyers-Levy says. “You’re focusing on the specific details in the lower-ceiling condition.”

Nature vs man-made view:

Another experiment demonstrated that college students with views of nature from their dorm rooms scored higher on measures of mental focus than did those who overlooked entirely man-made structures.

About lighting:

In one school district—Capistrano, Calif.—students in the sunniest classrooms advanced 26 percent faster in reading and 20 percent faster in math in one year than did those with the least daylight in their classrooms.

Going to work a little outside now …

April 23, 2009 | Filed Under Interesting 

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One Response to “Your room affects your innovation capacity”

  1. Dan Keldsen on May 15th, 2009

    Ah, biomimicry and what we can learn from what’s already been done.

    Who says innovation has to be about doing something new? The answers may already be all around us.

    Saw a fascinating interview of Interface (office furnishings) discussing similar concepts. How long before this trickles down to the thinking of real office space design and more importantly, use?

    Cheers,
    Dan

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