How to Use the Psychology of Space to Boost Your Creativity

Environmental psychology points to some easy changes you should make to your home office

If you’re a creative professional or artist who works at home either full- or part-time, you enjoy at least one immediate advantage over your office-bound peers:

People generate more ideas for novel and useful solutions to creative problems when they’re at home than in any other single environment.

Want to make your home an even more effective idea incubator? Apply what scientists in the field of environmental psychology have learned about the effects of space on creative thinking to your home office.

Environmental psychology is a branch of science that explores the influence of our physical surroundings on how we think, feel, and act. It hasn’t been around very long, having emerged around 1970. Despite its relatively brief existence, environmental psychology has exerted a significant influence on how architects and designers create buildings and spaces.

That influence has been felt most strongly so far in healthcare facility design. Thanks to data gathered through experimentation and field studies, as well as advances in architectural neuroscience and behavioral psychology, building professionals have been able to improve patient outcomes by incorporating scientific findings into the design of hospitals and other health-related facilities.

Food writer Nigella Lawson in her study.

But research in environmental psychology hasn’t been limited to issues of healthcare. For nearly two decades, scientists have been uncovering evidence that specific design characteristics correlate with improved creative thinking. Combined with what we know about the habitats of highly successful at-home creatives past and present (think Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Tina Fey), we now have at our disposal a virtual manual of best practices for shaping space to maximize creative output.