Good article in Fast Company on Creating Engaging Spaces for Engaging Ideas that served as a reminder how important environment is to us in augmenting and supporting our learning and living. I’ve come to be totally convinced that we are essentially products of our environments and that we still understand very little about these effects and seem to most often chose to ignore what we do know. I do my best to pay more attention to how environments affect me and to do a combination of creating environments that work best for me for a given function and conversely how to adapt to an environment I’m in for maximum benefit.
For example when I used to spend a lot of my time in airplanes flying around the world I found that the environment in an airplane seat, especially on longer flights, was ideal for me for reflective thinking and note taking and new idea generation. So I rarely got out my laptop, phone or tablet and instead spent a majority of my seat time with my pen & paper (usually the real thing, sometimes digital) and jotted down notes as I reflected back on recent conversations, visits, reading, presentations and the like. Environment is also one of the top reasons why I am finding my current lifestyle of living aboard my sailboat “Learnativity” and seeing the world from this aquatic perspective, to fit me so well. I made this unusual move to focus on learning as a way of being and now into my third year of this it is exceedingly successful.
So with this in mind I recommend you take some of your valuable time to consider what has recently been going on at Stanford's new d.school building designed for innovation. At the recent “trade show” like event they discovered the value of environment and noted:
Out goes the tech-focused approach of maximizing the number of iPads. In comes a human-centered approach of creating a warm living room. Using the nice furniture (on wheels) from the d.school, we created a nice cozy environment in the 8-foot by 8-foot space allotted to us.
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