Here are the factors to evaluate when you are considering an object’s ability to facilitate creativity:
✓ What is required to begin creativity? How much time do you need to spend gathering materials and setting up? Does it require you to purchase and gather materials in advance?
✓ How much time is required to put it away? Does someone need to keep cleaning it up, picking it up throughout the day?
✓ How many people can use it at once?
✓ Are there any concerns about parts being lost, removed, stolen, or broken? Are replacement components readily available?
✓ Age usability: is it as easy and compelling to use for babies as it is for seniors?
✓ Appeal to people with diverse abilities: Is it as easy and compelling for people with autism as it is for people who have movement disorders? Is it ADA compliant—can it be easily enjoyed by someone in a wheelchair, and by a one-year-old?
✓ Is it durable under non-recommended uses? Subject to the impulses of 11-year-old unsupervised boys?
✓ Is it tactile and multidimensional? Does it allow each user to control the interactions, thereby avoiding overstimulation and boredom? Does it use both hemispheres of the body, so that hands cross the midline?
✓ Does it have an adaptation threshold, in which rules are easily mastered and it becomes less appealing? Or is it an open-ended activity that never stops being stimulating, entertaining, creatively rewarding?
✓ Is the feedback of an action clear and rewarding enough that multiple people can discover it, without requiring signage?
✓ Does it fit into a compact space? What kinds of architectural modifications does it require?
✓ Is it appropriate in a business and professional environment? Are there any restrictions on where it can be used?
✓ Can you customize it to fit the brand/space so that it is unique?
✓ Does it offer a choice of collaboration and working/creating independently?
Beliefs about who is creative, and who gets to practice creativity, are changing.
We now recognize that creativity is the domain of all. In every industry, at every age, and for every profession, the ability to take a given set of constraints and imagine what’s possible, then create something new for others to enjoy, is a universal human need. Practice makes this skill grow stronger.
Looking to embed creativity into your space? Learn more.