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Where is your Creative Space? Where are you
when you get your best ideas?
Can a place actually help you be more creative? These questions have
intrigued me for some time now. I've snooped around a bunch of creative
spaces. Some stand alone brainstorming centers, some rooms dedicated to
creative thinking inside advertising agencies and innovation-focused
corporations, and some of the places I've made more conducive for my own
inventive efforts.
I've looked into creative space, because it seems to me that
if we knew whether or not a place could improve creativity, we might go there more often or at least whenever we wanted
great ideas. Which begs the question, when don't we want great ideas?
In my pursuit, I've surveyed working people from a variety of organizations.
"Where are you and what are you doing when you get your best ideas?" I ask. The most surprising result—people
do not get their best ideas where they work! It's not surprising that I get
this answer. It is surprising that we keep
insisting on spending so much of our time in the place where we get the
least desirable results. For a lot of people the office is an idea desert.
And another
surprise: None of the companies I surveyed has incorporated into their work routines the simple solution of going to the places
where they do get their best ideas. Some of those places—like
the shower of bedroom—don't exactly
make great office meeting rooms, but some do. Some people think better
outside, for example. I once worked with an art director at an ad agency,
who agreed with me that our office just wasn't an idea-generating asset. We
made a habit of going outside and walking around our block together. Bingo!
Every time we did this we never failed to come up with excellent results.
In our book
Think Naked: Childlike brilliance in the rough adult world,
Marco Marsan
and I offer four principles for getting better ideas. The first is to find
your Happy Place. That is, surround yourself with the people and conditions
most likely to support your creative efforts. You know who these people are
and what those conditions are. If you don't, keep your eyes open for a while
and notice. When you get a great idea, note and remember where you are and
what you're doing. Then do it some more.
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