Do make a mess !

From childhood, it has been drummed into us that we must keep our environment clean- clean your room, clean up your desk, dont litter the table etc etc. Now comes research which suggests that we may be stifling creativity with passion for cleanliness! Just when we had trained our children ( and half convinced my wife) comes this new piece of research!

Of course, historically, the evidence has favored the tidy camp. Cleanliness, as the proverb says, is next to godliness. The anthropologist Mary Douglas noted almost 50 years ago a connection between clean, open spaces and moral righteousness. More recently, psychologists have shown that the scent of citrus cleaning products is enough to raise people’s ethical standards and promote trust. Conversely, in another study, people were found to associate chaotic wilderness with death.

Order and disorder are prevalent in both nature and culture, which suggests that each environ confers advantages for different outcomes. Recently three experiments tested the novel hypotheses that orderly environments lead people toward tradition and convention, whereas disorderly environments encourage  creativity and breaking with tradition and convention. Experiment 1 showed that relative to participants in a disorderly room, participants in an orderly room chose healthier snacks and donated more money. Experiment 2 showed that participants in a disorderly room were more creative than participants in an orderly room. Experiment 3 showed a predicted crossover effect: Participants in an orderly room preferred an option labeled as classic, but those in a disorderly room preferred an option labeled as new. Whereas prior research on physical settings has shown that orderly settings encourage better behavior than disorderly ones, the current research tells a nuanced story of how different environments suit different outcomes.

For example when the subjects were in the tidy room, they chose the health boost more often — almost twice as often — when it had the “classic” label: that is, when it was associated with convention. Also as predicted, when the subjects were in the messy room, they chose the health boost more often — more than twice as often — when it was said to be “new”: that is, when it was associated with novelty. Thus, people greatly preferred convention in the tidy room and novelty in the messy room.

Given that divergence from the status quo is the essence of ingenuity, a second experiment  tested whether messiness fostered creativity.

Forty-eight research subjects were assigned to messy or tidy rooms. This time, subjects were told to imagine that a Ping-Pong ball factory needed to think of new uses for Ping-Pong balls, and to write down as many ideas as they could. Independent judges rated the subjects’ answers for degree of creativity, which can be done reliably. Answers rated low in creativity included using Ping-Pong balls for beer pong (a party game that in fact uses Ping-Pong balls, hence the low rating on innovation). Answers rated high in creativity included using Ping-Pong balls as ice cube trays, and attaching them to chair legs to protect floors.

It was found that the messy room subjects were more creative. Not only were their ideas 28 percent more creative on average, there was a remarkable boost from being in the messy room — these subjects came up with almost five times the number of highly creative responses as did their tidy-room counterparts!

These findings have practical implications. There is, for instance, a minimalist design trend taking hold in contemporary office spaces: out of favor are private walled-in offices — and even private cubicles. Today’s office environments often involve desk sharing and have minimal “footprints” (smaller office space per worker), which means less room to make a mess.

At the same time, the working world is abuzz about cultivating innovation and creativity, endeavors might instead be hampered by the minimalist movement. While cleaning up certainly has its benefits, clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow!

MIT seems to find a correlation between smarts and messiness.  “Messiness is often associated with artistic, creative and scientific or mathematical genius, spontaneity, but also with carelessness, eccentricity, madness and unreliability.”

Some envidence: here are the desks of Einstein, Jobs and Twain!