When it comes to working or studying, the place where we do it has a significant impact on the type of thoughts and actions we generate. According to a 2013 study from the University of Minnesota, more clutter means more creativity, because there is less attachment to the uprightness and discipline that orderly environments inspire.
Always under the conservative gaze of prehistoric worldviews, mess in bedrooms, homes, and workplaces is seen as something improper and the product of the bad habits of a “human who was not correctly educated.” That moral claim could not be more subjective, since the way of organizing oneself has no definitive theory, much less a recurring practice that has been proven to be the most effective for the greatest number of people.
Some people are characterized by order, and based on that spatial neatness they can achieve their goals, while others achieve the same or more by being totally messy in the different habitats they find themselves in. In fact, according to a study from the University of Minnesota, in the United States, published in the scientific journal Psychological Science in 2013, clutter has very important virtues, such as enhancing creativity.
The Experiments
The study is based on three experiments on the work modes and spatial organization of university students. In the first, a first group of students completed a questionnaire in a very messy room. The second group did it in a very tidy room. Ten minutes after finishing the questionnaire, both groups were offered an apple or a chocolate bar. In turn, they were also given the opportunity to donate to charity, if they wished. As is easy to guess, given the implicit coercion of the environments to which we are subject, participants in the tidy room were twice as likely to choose the apple and also donated more money than those in the messy room. After this first experiment, the study's authors come up with a not very novel hypothesis: orderly spaces inspire discipline and ethical rectitude.
For the second experiment, the students were taken to two rooms, one messy and one immaculate, and were asked to come up with new uses for ping-pong balls. Oh, surprise, the students who worked in the messier room produced the most creative uses according to the judges who evaluated them. The partial conclusion was that order and formality are also rigid virtues, while a certain detachment from the “right path to follow” is fundamental to developing greater creativity.
The third experiment invited the two groups of students to choose additional components for their diet, and those who had worked in orderly environments chose the “classic” over the “new.” The study suggests that homogenization is common and typical of the search for identification and a sense of security, but that just as working in an orderly environment produces a greater acceptance of what is “given,” and doing it on a messy desk incites creativity, efficiency is found in a subjective combination of both spaces. That is, the classic yet innovative controlled disorder.
