Full Title: The Cathedral Effect, Joy Generator, & More
Highlights
The visual shows that the majority of a retiree’s time is spent on sleeping (9 hours), relaxing and leisure (6 hours), and watching television (4.5 hours). Very little time is spent on reading (0.5 hours), socializing (0.5 hours), or exercise/recreation (0.3 hours). (View Highlight)
The traditional concept of retirement is grounded in a foundational assumption that there should be a “before and after” within your life—that you grind away for years and years in the before and then get to enjoy the after. (View Highlight)
The goal is to design a life that you don’t need to retire from. (View Highlight)
A life that has the freedom to balance fulfilling work with the relationships, hobbies, experiences, and pursuits through which you derive joy. (View Highlight)
In 2007, researchers from Oxford published a study that found that ceiling height impacted creativity and focus. Specifically, higher ceilings promoted creative problem solving, while lower ceilings promoted logical problem solving. (View Highlight)
These results were later confirmed by an experiment that took fMRI scans of participants’ brains as they were shown images of high or low ceiling spaces. The parts of their brains that lit up while looking at high ceiling spaces were those used for broad exploration. (View Highlight)
A design writer named William Lidwell coined the phrase Cathedral Effect to capture the phenomenon whereby big, tall spaces promote creative, abstract, exploratory behavior. (View Highlight)
Learning 1: If you want to think bigger, get in bigger spaces.Your environment creates your entire reality. When you spend time in big, open, inspiring spaces, your mind becomes big, open, and inspired. (View Highlight)
As it turns out, the Cathedral Effect is the science that supports my assertion. Big spaces really do catalyze big, creative thinking. (View Highlight)
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