Take a few minutes to stop and take notice of your surroundings.
It’s easy to make this a mindful exercise, deepening your attention on what is around you and noticing how it makes you feel, think and behave.
Do you long to be in this space or dread having to return?
Part of my involvement with the development of a Fusion Space is to help people to understand the importance of how a space makes people feel. We humans are sensitive to what is around us, it influences things like our general mood and the motivation for the task ahead.
If we get it right, it’s as if the space has the right energy for what we want to achieve and if we get it wrong, well it adds to the feelings of stress and creativity decreases.
In the poorly designed spaces people will quickly feel drained, anxious and depleted of creativity and importantly for businesses, this leads to ineffective use of time. If we consider a meeting room that is not human centric we can expect long ineffective meetings and poor outcomes.
If spaces can harm or heal we need to consider this throughout businesses, health care settings and places of learning and our very own homes and home offices.
The bigger picture is just that, BIG. Harm can be caused by the spaces we spend our time and the way we light it, the quality of the air, the way it sounds and poorly considered technology that overwhelms. And of course, the way the space makes us feel, think and behave.
The meeting room is only the beginning. If spaces can harm or heal we need to consider this throughout businesses, health care settings and places of learning and our very own homes and home offices.
I hope that in time it will be natural to consider how a space makes us feel, how it helps us to perform at our best and encourages us to be #WELLbeings.
We would love to hear how your spaces make you feel.