By Flavia Ventura

The Importance of a Space

One doesn’t take advice in count until they’ve randomly experiences its efficacy. And that’s exactly how it went for me. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I truly started to understand how important and influential a space or, more in general, a place, can be on creativity.

If earlier during the course I saw the studio as a source of endless inspiration, at the moment I can’t think of a less stimulating place where to scamp ideas. This is not to say the studio is some sort of dull environment, on the contrary. Though, I have noticed that after a while of working in the same space, this gets drained of all its creative energy.

 A couple of years ago, I stumbled upon a Chris Martin interview about the creative process, to this day I consider it one of the closest attempts to grasp its meaning. When asked, the singer simply compared it to fishing. ‘When fishing, you need to know the arts and crafts of it, you need to be prepared to catch an hypothetical fish, you need to be mentally predisposed for it; the creative process is the same, ideas come from somewhere, they’re already in the air, you just need to be predisposed to catch them.’

I realize just now that to be predisposed to catch ‘these’ ideas, I need to be in an environment that allows me to, as well as be in the right state of mind — it’s funny how many times before mentors repeated these notions to us and how they’ve only now sunk in.

This explains why, for me, a two hour session in a coffee shop seems to be more effective than a 5 hour one at the school these days. To treat this as a Problem-Solution matter, in the last couple of days I’ve tried to move around the studio as much as possible. From scamping on the floor to doing strategy work on the couches —  it’s working a bit better. I’m hoping that if I keep moving corners, stairs, tables and isles, the studio will get back to be just what I need to give birth to new ideas.

Another learning I took from going on ‘the perfect scamping space hunt’, is that a place can do much more than allowing us to be creative, it can drain us of our energy or it can gift us with it.

I now know that I have been doing at least one thing right. From the beginning I’ve had the feeling that taking a day off to simply chill wouldn’t have recharged my batteries. In fact, if we all have a particular something that gives us our energy back, that for me would be going home. So if I do take a day off, you know what I am doing — going away from grey London and saluting sunny ‘Carbs Land’.