How Spatial Ambiguity Promotes Creativity-Blog-Senses & Spaces

Do you often think about your best ideas, and where you are most creative?

Think about where you’re inspired to write, where good ideas arise, or where you have the urge to create music, draw, or dance. Is it a place where you do your creative work?

Spatial Ambiguity

Whether it's the beach, your favorite cafe, the park, the gym, on the road, at the store, at your home, or even in the shower - The ambiance of a space influences our thought model- how we feel, think, and act.

Environmental psychology is a branch of science that explores the parameters and variables of the physical surroundings that influence one's mood, behavior, productivity, effectiveness, and attitude. Specific design characteristics correlate with improved creative thinking, and those qualities are unique to each person- we each create an identity and bring life to the spaces we live, work, and play every single day.

Creativity requires subtle cues in the environment that significantly influence our creative output. Design factors such as: views and vistas, wall color, decoration, ceiling height, lighting, aroma and temperature, are qualities and characteristics that affect the relationship between space and ideation.

Understanding the relationship between cognitive processes and our perceived space fosters an appropriately creative state of mind, and empowers the intrinsically motivated exploration of unusual and complex stimuli. Thus, clarifying the importance of spatial ambiguity relative to one’s creativity.

Measures of Spatial Ambiguity and its Effects on Creativity

Creativity requires the use of imagination or original ideas, and is a natural tendency of every individual to express oneself to varying degrees. Relatively, ambiguity reflects the quality of having more than one interpretation. The varying levels of tolerance in ambiguity determine the creative ability of an individual, and can be considered as a personality trait which corresponds to the way an individual tends to perceive and respond to ambiguous environments or stimuli.

Multivariate experiences and interpretations of a space gives us the chance to add life to our environments. When we experience our physical surroundings with ambiguity, how does this stimulate inspiration and creativity?....from our own life backgrounds and unique perception, we are able to create an answer. It allows us to express our internal thoughts through inspirations of our physical world.

What type of atmosphere inspires you?

Have you ever thought about the design of your bedroom? Your workspace? Your favorite go-to spot? How the layout and design of these spaces have some sort of identity reflecting YOU. The characteristics of our spatial preferences reflect our unique personality traits...and being unique is at the heart of creativity.

Our individuality is the basis for imagination and innovation. We all have a drive to create, imagine, and inspire new ideas and bring them to reality. Unquestionably, this is an internal drive that is unique to each individual. We all come from different backgrounds, have personal experiences, different mindsets and personalities.

If creativity stems from our unique and unpredictable selves, can the same thing be said about ambiguous spaces? Why do some of us find ourselves having daily rituals of exercising or sitting down at park, while some find eagerness to cook in the kitchen or find comfort sitting down on our favorite couch as an effective “idea stimulator”?

Let’s take a look at schools for example:

Successfully designed schools provide flexible spaces that are multi-functional in order to meet the varying learning styles of the students. Some designs incorporate: small, quiet spaces like reading areas and intimate collaborating areas, or performance spaces such as the gymnasium or performing arts theater. Playful, lively, stimulating school buildings should be a safe and engaging environment to inspire children each and every day. Each student expresses themselves and their own creative and learning abilities uniquely. The spaces within these schools create a dynamic atmosphere of different spatial qualities that cater to the varying learning styles of students.

If our educational environment was designed for a singular learning style rather than multimodal flexibility, these spaces would not promote opportunities for development, provide highly successful learning outcomes, nor would foster creativity within the students.

“The nature of creativity is to make space for things to happen” - Iain McGilchrist

Ambiguous spaces encourage creativity by allowing individuals to experience versatile settings by stimulating users, engaging their creative abilities, and building their creative potential through design of the spaces in our environments. These experiences can be of significance when wanting to foster creativity in work and life so let’s acknowledge the different spaces we live, work, play in to bring out our best and most creative selves!