Make Your Workspace More Creative

One of the best things you can do to increase your creativity is to create an environment which gets your creative juices flowing.  In order to help inspire you in putting together a workspace you can look forward to entering each day, below you’ll find pictures of creative cubicles from CNN’s iReports, as well as photographs of the spaces in which some of the world’s most famous writers have created some of their best work. Enjoy!

Creative Cubicles – CNN’s iReports

This cubicle is home to a gnome collection–over 700 gnomes live here–, a bouncy ball collection, and a dice collection.

Here’s someone who started out bringing in a few knick-knacks and ended up with this:

This person decorated his cubicle in response to a contest his company was holding for the best decorated cubicle. He ended up working in this beautiful Safari in the Serengeti inspired cubicle:

Meet “The Red Mahogany Luxury Paneled Cubicle with Dark Cherry Hardwood Floors”:

This is “Lulu’s Casita”:

This is more of a creative practical joke: a coworker was always blaming others for his mistakes and he became known as the bus driver in the group–since he was always throwing others under the bus.  His coworkers turned his cubicle into a bus complete with red flashing LED lights and working sliding door.

This person’s cubicle is decorated like a tropical beach:

This cubicle started with a model of the Millennium Falcon.  The Falcon was solo for several years and then the cubicle owner decided to add an element of the Dark Side with Darth Vader’s Tie Fighter. Soon a shroud of darkness (black fabric spray painted with glitter on the walls and black construction paper on the desk) fell over the cubicle as the rest of the Imperial Fleet started to show up.

This person goes all out when it’s time to decorate for the Holidays. Here’s what she does to her cubicle for Christmas:

And here’s Halloween:

Writer’s Workspaces

This is the room in Haworth Parsonage in which the Brontë sisters used to write and discuss their work with each other. When the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell visited in September 1853, she had this to say: “The room looked the perfection of warmth, snugness and comfort, crimson predominating in the furniture”.

Rudyard Kipling spent the second half of his life at Bateman’s, his Jacobean home in the Weald in south-east England. Each morning he went to his study to write or to pace up and down on his Indian rugs. Since he was short, he had his English walnut chair placed on blocks so that he could sit comfortably at his French walnut table.

Andrew Motion prefers a bare desk-top. His bookshelves, however, are another matter; even though they’re arranged in more-or-less alphabetical order he’s never been able to resist cluttering them with cards, photographs and the like.

He explains that always–wherever he’s lived–he’s placed two things at eye level: the tinted photograph of his mother as a girl, and an ancient blue-painted Indian figure. These are his good luck charms.

He has several portrait reproductions of his favorite writers–including Tennyson, Edward Thomas, and Keats. He adds that everytime he walks into the room he thinks: “All the words I’ll ever need are here; the only thing I have to do is get them out in the right order.”

Vita Sackville-West was a prolific writer: she wrote everything from biographies to novels, from non-fiction to science-fantasy, poetry, travelogues, gardening books, weekly newspaper columns, and, of course, correspondence. Here’s a quote by her on the importance of writing:

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?”

Here’s an image of her desk:

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photo credit: Travis Isaacs

Related Posts:

• 18 Ways to be Uber Creative
• Three Incredibly Effective Creativity Techniques
• Four Outstanding Thoughts on Innovation
• Thoughts to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing
• Creative Thinking Techniques: The Playful Edition

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