Posts tagged ‘Creative Spaces’
Creating Passionate Users
I’ve only recently discovered Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users. Kathy works out of a vintage 1966 23-foot Silver Streak trailer. Certainly a Creative Space and what she referes to as a playful work environment.
Kathy’s blog has quickly become a must-read for me and today’s post on managing expectations – don’t make the demo look done is fascinating. Her bottom line is that how ‘done’ something looks should match how ‘done’ something is. Common sense? You’d be surprised…
Work in progress
Work hasn’t been much of a Creative Space recently because we’ve been going through a refurb and also budging up to make room for all the extra people that are joining us. I have however learnt a lot of important things over the last couple of months:
1. The piece of paper you want is always at the bottom of your plastic packing crate
2. Wherever you left your desk the night before, it will be somewhere entirely different the next morning
3. Office chairs can not only move position overnight, but change their height and incline too
4. Removals men do not feel the cold and will therefore leave external doors open all day while you sit there shivering in four layers of woolies
5. Your coat is not missing. Its just that the coat stand it was hanging off has been moved to other end of the building.
6. It is actually possible to continue to work while someone puts twenty desks together immediately behind you using an electric drill
Is your desk the window to your personality?
Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book Blink describes an experiment where a psychologist called Samuel Gosling asked members of the public to rate college students against key personality traits on the sole basis of spending 15 minutes in their dorm rooms.
He found that these strangers were more accurate than the student’s own friends in rating the students on conscientiousness, emotional stability and their openness to new experiences.
Could this be applied to the work environment? Does a messy desk or office indicate to those around you a messy mind? Or is it a sign of creativity? Or is it all a load of nonsense?
My desk is (apparently) freakishly tidy, but I hope that people don’t imagine my thinking is just as unimaginative. Maybe there’s hope – Gosling’s research also discovered that these strangers weren’t nearly as good as the student’s friends in measuring how animated, talkative, outgoing and agreeable someone is.
I think in the end it comes back to us all needing the right space around us to help us think, whatever that space may be. Which brings me rather neatly back to Creative Spaces.
We all need space to think Creatively
The brilliant Russell Davies and his Creative Spaces lens on Squidoo got me started on what has turned into a six month rant on the importance of working where we work best.
No-one can be expected to produce their best work sitting at a desk exposed to strip lighting and a constantly ringing phone. Creative Spaces are the kind of nourishing, inspiring places, spaces or views that are conducive to creativity and ideas generation. They don’t have to necessarily be a brightly coloured, gone-mad-in-Ikea special room, a Creative Space could just as easily be a local café or simply a wall of inspiring images.
My favourite Creative Spaces are on my flickr. I’ve just gone wireless at home, so my new Creative Space might be tucked up in bed with my laptop. Don’t hold your breath for any pics though…
