You would be forgiven for thinking that social distancing only recently stormed into the global lexicon in the wake of the COVID-19 health crisis. Yet the phrase was already in the air nearly two decades ago, when it was associated with one of the most influential psychological theories to have emerged in recent times. The story of its original meaning is particularly relevant to workplace design today because it brings into focus several science-backed techniques for boosting creativity and spurring innovation through the shaping of space. With the enormous challenges currently facing our profession and the world at large, the need to re-tell that story and familiarize ourselves with these techniques has never been greater.
Our Binary Brain
The narrative begins in the early 2000s, when several researchers began exploring the relationship between mental processing and perceptions of distance. Through experimentation they came to discover that how close or far we view ourselves to be relative to an object of our attention determines which of two cognitive styles we’ll assume.
In everyday speech, we refer to these binary modes of mental processing as left- and right-brain thinking. Scientists generally prefer the terms analytic for the left, and synthetic, creative, holistic, or insightful for the right, because they’re more descriptive and in closer alignment with how our brain actually functions than left-right terminology.
Figure 2 above lists attributes associated with each style. Analytic thinking is rational, sequential, detail-oriented, narrowly focused, lends itself to solving problems having a single correct answer, draws from objective knowledge residing outside oneself, and seeks to take advantage of the world as it currently exists.
Creative thinking is its mirror opposite. It draws on intuition, imagination, and insight rather than logical reasoning; is often meandering and circuitous; sees things at a generalized and broad-brush rather than concrete level; arrives at multiple solutions to a problem; turns our thoughts inward rather than outward; and is exploratory instead of exploitative.
Relative to distance, we tend to assume an analytic mindset when our attention is directed toward something nearby, and a creative outlook when it’s far away.