Kitchen. Kennebunk, Maine. Interior design by Deborah Farrand for Dressing Rooms. Photography by Eric Roth.
The Psychology of Space
How to design your home to simulate ideas and spark innovation.
Posted 4/16/20 | Updated 4/7/25
Jonas Salk was at the start of his career when he was lured to the University of Pittsburgh Medical School in 1947 with the promise of his own laboratory.
It was only when he arrived for work that he discovered his so-called laboratory was actually a cramped, dark room in the basement of a local municipal hospital. Undeterred by his depressing surroundings, Salk plunged into his work, anxious to find a vaccine that would eradicate the polio scourge devastating young people around the world.
Success proved elusive. Roadblock after roadblock impeded progress. Salk became physically and mentally exhausted. After several years of hard labor, it was painfully evident he needed a break to clear his mind. Traveling to the charming Italian hill town of Assisi, the scientist took up residence in a 13th-century Franciscan monastery for a period of reflection and relaxation.
Architecturally, the hilltop monastery complex was worlds away from the scruffy subterranean lair he'd left behind in Pittsburgh. In place of narrow hospital corridors lit by harsh fluorescent bulbs, he now found himself ambling about expansive courtyards encircled by columned arcades. Inside the monastery church he would gaze at walls decorated with beautiful fresco paintings, their colorful surfaces illuminated by natural light streaming in from the tall windows running down the building's flanks.
Transported to an idyllic environment, Salk's mind began to unlock as he pondered the problem of the vaccine once again. In time he was able to break through the mental blocks that had stymied him back home. As Salk himself later wrote:
The spirituality of the architecture there was so inspiring that I was able to do intuitive thinking far beyond any I had done in the past. Under the influence of that historic place I intuitively designed the research that I felt would result in a vaccine for polio. I returned to my laboratory in Pittsburgh to validate my concepts and found that they were correct.
Forever convinced of the positive interplay of mind, creativity, and environment, Salk went on to commission one of the great architects of his era, Louis I. Kahn, to design a building to house an institute for science and the humanities he was founding in La Jolla, California. Salk spoke fondly of his time in Italy in his conversations with the architect, and asked him to incorporate elements he'd seen at Assisi in the new complex. He also insisted that the interiors be column-free, convinced that minimizing physical encumbrances would facilitate collaboration among the scholars working at the facility.
The building was finally completed in 1965, and today is ranked among the seminal works of modern architecture and landscape design. Groundbreaking research continues in the complex as well.
Salk's story of his travels to Assisi and their aftermath is enthralling. But did things actually happen as he described them? That is, was there really a cause-and-effect relationship between the beauty of the setting and his creative breakthrough? Could the sight and experience of his surroundings have penetrated so deeply into his psyche that it affected his brain functions? Or is the story of Salk's Italian sojourn little more than a charming anecdote that confuses coincidence for causation, feeling for fact?
As it turned out, just as his Institute was getting underway in its new facility, a small cadre of fellow scientists was beginning to explore the very questions Salk's experience appeared to raise. By the end of the decade their discoveries had coalesced into a new area of scientific investigation. That field was environmental psychology, the science of person-to-place interaction.
Simply put, environmental psychology studies the influence of the built and natural environments on how we think, feel, and act. Among its goals are to replace intuitive inferences with scientifically verified deductions, and to raise the quality of life by solving real-world problems.
Many fascinating insights emerged from its ranks over the ensuing years. But it was in 1984 that a paper on environmental psychology was published that would have a profound effect on the design fields, and in some respects lay the groundwork for books like this.
The paper was written by a professor at the University of Delaware named Roger S. Ulrich. Trained as a medical biologist, Ulrich had a personal and long-held interest in the relationship between environment and human health because of his experience as a teenager, when a kidney ailment kept him bedridden at his house for long stretches. Hours were spent with little to do other than look out the window, where a tall pine tree stood. In time the young Ulrich began to intuit that the sight of the tree was mediating the stress of his condition, aiding his eventual recovery.
Years later, he had the opportunity to test his hunch by conducting a study in a hospital in Paoli, Pennsylvania. He chose for his subjects a group of patients with a similar profile. All had been at the hospital for a particular type of gall bladder surgery within the same nine-year period. All were between twenty and sixty-nine years old, all were free of past psychological disorders, and all had undergone the procedure between the months of May and October. Most importantly for our purposes, all had stayed in rooms identical in appearance. Identical, that is, except for one significant detail: the view out the window. One segment of the study group saw foliage on trees planted in an outside courtyard. The other looked across to a blank brick wall.
The question Ulrich sought to answer was this: did the difference in view have any impact on the health of his subjects?
Ulrich scrutinized the patient records to find out. What he discovered was striking. Patients who could see treetops from their hospital beds required less medication during their stay, experienced fewer complications during convalescence, and were released more quickly after the operation was performed than those exposed to the masonry wall.
Like many breakthrough discoveries, Ulrich's findings raised as many new questions as it answered. First and foremost, how and why was the mere sight of a leafy canopy powerful enough to alter human physiology, whereas the bricks were not?
There are a lot of theories out there attempting to explain the why, so I'll reserve that discussion until the main section of the book, where I can give it the space it deserves. As for the mechanism causing the change, the short answer is something called brain priming.
What is brain priming? In his book Universal Principles of Design, author and industrial designer William Lidwell defines the concept as:
The activation of specific concepts in memory for the purposes of influencing subsequent behaviors.
Whenever stimuli are received by the senses-sights, sounds, smells, touches, tastes-concepts are automatically activated in memory. Once concepts are activated, they stay activated for a period of time, capable of influencing subsequent thoughts, reactions, emotions, and behaviors.
In simplified terms, brain priming occurs when an external stimulus enters a person's consciousness through one of the five senses and then triggers a response related to the nature of the input. In Ulrich's study the prime was the view of trees, the response an improvement in patient well-being.
Keep in mind, though, that in Ulrich's case the stimulus didn't come about randomly or by accident. The fact that the trees were placed where they were, and that the hospital wing where the patients were housed was planned in such a way as to provide a view either of greenery or masonry, resulted from conscious decisions made by the architects, landscape designers, and administrators responsible for planning the facility. The visual cue impacting the patients, in other words, was specifically a design trigger, a consequence of choices made by the individuals in the course of configuring building and landscape, and which presumably would have been different had they been aware of Ulrich's findings at the time.
The paper raises another, even broader line of inquiry: if Ulrich was able to uncover a correlation between patient welfare and exterior views, what about all the other attributes that make up the character of a space? Could scientists utilize a similar methodology to investigate whether such design components as materials and finishes, lighting, furnishings, artwork, sound, temperature, and room shape might lead to equally positive outcomes? After all, if the principal objective of healthcare design is patient wellness, then shouldn't every effort be made to maximize the designer's toolkit for achieving this end?
The answer to these questions, of course, is yes. And that's just what happened in the decades since Ulrich's paper came out. In fact, so busy did the field become, that the practice of applying scientific research to shaping buildings and spaces eventually morphed into a professionally recognized approach called evidence-based design (EBD). EBD is most prevalent in the healthcare sector, as my brief history suggests, but it's since made inroads in the workplace, residential, and educational spheres as well. Its fundamental premise is that data-backed science can and should inform design decisions in tandem with the traditional determinants of aesthetics, personal preferences, client demands, fashion and history, technical and symbolic requirements, context, and so forth.
All of which begs one final question: if a physical setting can be deliberately configured to promote the healing process by priming occupants with stimuli scientifically linked to a particular outcome, then could it be configured to elicit other types of mental reactions as well? Like, say, improved creativity?
The fact is, for many years now researchers, environmental psychologists, architects, and designers have learned a great deal about how the elements of physical space influence divergent and convergent thinking, to the point where we now have at our disposal a remarkable storehouse of techniques for boosting creative productivity through the manipulation of mass and space. It's out of this data trove that I've drawn many of the creativity tactics presented in the pages that follow. To my knowledge this is the first book to aggregate this information in a single source.
So Jonas Salk was right. Place does matter. It mattered to him when he was trying to break through the creative impasse that had halted his progress toward squelching a dangerous scourge. It mattered to the patients in a Pennsylvania hospital as they struggled to recover from an invasive procedure. And it should matter to you.
Brains and Bodies
So far, I've mainly framed my commentary as if creativity were principally cerebral in nature. Brain primes, idea conception, divergent thinking — all of these points of discussion would seem to suggest that a knack for unearthing novel and useful ideas is something that starts and ends in our heads. Yet a wide circle of psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists, and philosophers is putting a serious strain on that assumption by arguing that creativity is, in truth, a two-way street. Inspiration for creative insight can flow as much from the body to the brain as the other way around, they claim.
There's evidence to back them up. Time and again researchers find that engaging the body in the process of solving a problem can spur creative thinking. In one experiment, subjects who were encouraged to perform the two-arm gesture we commonly use to express the phrase "on the one hand...on the other hand" were able to verbalize more and better solutions to a creative challenge than a comparison group confined in their use of their limbs. Another study by the same team measured the effects of different styles of walking on idea formulation. A third of the subjects walked around in a fixed rectangular path, a third roamed freely, and the last third didn't walk at all. Guess who came out on top after everyone took the same divergent thinking test? Those who wandered aimlessly.
And in my favorite demonstration, a group of subjects enacted the classic descriptor of creativity as "thinking outside the box" by literally sitting alongside a cardboard carton while completing an exercise designed to measure their ability to find connections among seemingly unrelated concepts, a key dimension of creative aptitude. Other participants sat inside the carton, and still others attempted to solve the same problems without any carton in sight. Once again, it was the people who gave physical form to the idea of unconstrained and uninhibited thought who performed the best-by a margin of 20%, no less.
Now, you'll notice that each study involved a metaphor, by which I mean the representation of one thing by another. In the first example it was the gesture of opposing hands to symbolize the ability to see things from different perspectives, in the second free versus proscribed movement to stand in for divergent versus convergent thinking, and in the third a box to connote the presence or absence of mental constraint. All the metaphors were evoked by physical movement or positioning. All resonate with the theme of creativity.
To the extent that enacting these metaphors stimulated a change in behavior among the subjects — i.e., they became more creative than their non-metaphorically activated peers-it's fair to say that their enactments functioned like primes. Unlike the cases of brain priming I described in the previous section, however, the stimuli didn't issue from where the enactors were, but from what they were doing.
Metaphorically-derived primes are one type of behavior-based technique for enhancing creative performance researchers have identified. Another type involves generic activities that on the surface appear to have nothing directly to do with creativity. These include exercising, lying down, performing mundane chores, napping, sleeping, playing, and taking a shower. The fact that these are all common household behaviors is among the reasons that home is a hotbed of creativity. I'll discuss each one of them, and others, in the main section of the book.
Are we ready, then, to nudge the brain off its traditional pedestal as the principal nexus of idea origination? Certainly not. On the contrary, the creative brain is getting more attention these days than ever, thanks largely to a nifty technology called brain imaging. Brain scanning, as it's also termed, is an umbrella term for a variety of techniques used to map neurological activity. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and computed axial tomography (CAT), are among the techniques garnering a lot of press in popular media as well as in scientific journals.
It's easy to see why. There's some pretty intriguing stuff coming out of the field. In one experiment, brain scans revealed that high-performing creatives have many more neural connections between their left and right brains than average performers. So much for the long-held belief that creativity stems from right brain dominance, or that our two hemispheres operate as practically independent organisms depending on the activity.
Other studies building on neuroimaging technology indicate that musicians who improvise a lot during performance-think freestyle rappers and jazz musicians-experience lower than normal activity in the front part of our brain believed to manage planning and self-censorship functions, and higher activity in the section thought to regulate thought and action. The reverse was true when they switched to musical pieces they knew by heart. The relationship of creative style to brain function neatly parallels the polarities of divergent and convergent thinking.
Lately, though, there's been something of a backlash against exaggerating what can be gleaned from these tantalizing peeks into the gray matter contained within our crania. Part of the problem is that the brain is simply too complex for us to fully distill the information that's coming to us at this stage of our investigations, no matter how many brightly colored snapshots of blood oozing through it we ogle. Another is that many regions of the brain appear to have multiple functions, which makes it tough to be conclusive as to which part is performing which function when a person is being creative. That said, there's much to be gained from the emerging technologies, and I'll be citing neuroscientific research in the text where it helps corroborate or shed light on the creativity tactic under discussion.
Here's the thought I want to leave you with: a creative idea is not a disembodied thought bubble born and bred in our brains, but the result of an intricate interplay of mind, body, and place. Among my goals in writing this book is to show how these three factors intersect, and what you can do to exploit their interrelationships to your advantage.
Next: Designate a Creative Space
©2020 Donald M. Rattner. All rights reserved.
My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation
Donald M. Rattner, AIA, is the author of My Creative Space and the principal of Donald M. Rattner, Architect. more