KM: Selfishly, I’m hoping you can give me some pointers on how I can make my office more- Is it more conducive to my creativity or making me more creative, or how would you characterize your specialty in that way? 

DR: We are in possession of a lot of knowledge about how our physical environment, built environment but also the natural environment, influences how we as people think, feel and act, and in many respects in ways that we’re totally unaware of. For the last maybe, I don’t know, 20, 25 years, researchers, scientists have been looking into how these particular elements of our physical space change the way we think and feel and act, and in particular, how we think creatively. And what’s also nice is that all of these, what they call environmental cues or design triggers that we can talk about, at the same time that they’re boosting our ability to come up with new ideas and new insights, all of these things that we associate with creativity, they’re actually also making us healthier and happier too. So it’s winning the trifecta here. You get a lot of positive outcomes as a result of your applying this research to shaping your space, right? Because, you know, shaping your space is a very deliberate act. You’re making a series of decisions about what this thing is going to look like, what color it is, what kind of furnishings, how wide, how big, how tall, depending on your circumstances. So you can make decisions that apply this knowledge in order to create these desirable outcomes. 

And what I discovered as I kind of got into the subject is that there’s an enormous amount of material out there. It covers a whole range of components that go into making a space, but it’s all over the place in terms of where you find it, or it used to be at least. Some of it was in scientific journals, that’s very deep within academia. Some of it comes through in the popular press. You might read an article here, an article there about new discoveries and how our physical space changes our mindset, changes how we behave. But my goal in writing this book, My Creative Space was to bring all this material together under one roof so to speak, between two covers I guess, And making it accessible to not only my fellow designers, architects, interior designers, and so forth like yourself, but also to the general public. So that meant kind of translating the scientific jargon, distilling the essence of this information and turning it into actionable techniques. Which is. okay, first, I’m going to explain why this particular element in your space has this effect on you, and I may draw from neuroscience and scientific research and psychology and so forth. And then let’s talk about, okay, how do we actually put this into action in our space? And it’s just been a really fascinating journey. I must say I learned a lot myself. You know, when I got into it I thought, okay, this is a good bit of material, but as I got into it further and further, it just kept coming. To where in the book, My Creative Space, there’s 48 what I call tactics or techniques that people can use. So I try to kind of break them down into their fundamental components and that covers everything from colors, to furnishings, to physical dimensions of space and so on and so forth.

KM: But your background is you’re an architect, are you also- I mean, I don’t want to say only an architect because as we know, that’s pretty exciting in itself, right?

DR: Time consuming.

KM: And time consuming. But I mean, how did you decide to go off of the typical path of an architect and decide to get more into the psychology side of things?

DR: Right. So first, just to touch on something you said. So what I do in the book is I try to break these techniques down into bite-size morsels. So they literally are standalone almost mini chapters. They’re a thousand words, 1200 words each, and that covers everything from the why does it happen to the how to do it. So I’ve written this book in a way that you can read it straight through if you want, but you could also kind of take it one chunk at a time or bounce around and say, okay, I’m trying to figure out what color to paint my walls in my home office, you can zoom right in on color and you don’t have to read it in sequence to find that material. 

But in terms of how I got to this place, yeah, it wasn’t planned, it wasn’t expected, and it came fairly far down in terms of my career development. I’ve been at this for quite a few years now, that is being an architect. Along the way, I got a commission to do a project that called for modular construction. So for folks listening, modular construction is where you can actually build a building first by constructing a series of, think of them as boxes, shoe box shaped containers, or parts of buildings in a factory. So you might have the walls, the floors and the ceilings, and you might have plumbing and roughing in the walls, and you’ve got a certain amount of construction that happens in the factory. And then they put these long boxes on the back of trucks, you might’ve seen them going down the highway and they truck these boxes to the site itself where they then lower them down with a crane. They bolt them together, they finish them off on the outside, on the inside, do whatever is left to be done, and voila, you have a building. Which obviously is very different from the classic quote-unquote stick building technique where piece by piece, the contractor’s bringing things to a site and assembling them mostly there. So this just got me thinking about, oh, that’s interesting. It’s like the difference between being creative by drawing on a blank piece of paper with crayons like when you were a kid, versus let’s say building with Legos, right? Because Legos is like, here’s how you’re creative with Legos. These are these bricks – that’s what they call them – and you only get to use these bricks, but you can combine them in a zillion billion, really infinite number of different ways to create almost anything. So there’s two very different ways of thinking about creativity. All of which is to say, it got my wheels turning. I started to read up on creativity, and I guess because I’m an architect I looked at a lot of material through the lens of an architect, and that’s when I started to come across all this research connecting physical space to the creative mindset. And then it was just, whoa, gotta check this out, gotta do this. And the wheels kept turning, and then it turned into a book and here we are. 

KM: Yeah. Those modular houses, we had one that went up next to us when I was renting recently, and it was like magic. All of a sudden, I looked out my window and there was a building but it was only half of it, somehow they had assembled half of it, so it was like this full-size dollhouse looking thing with a section. I was just looking at the section of the house, like the toilet was there and all that stuff was there on that one half. It’s pretty amazing what we can do. And anyway, but sorry, that made me think of that. So if you could tell us just a couple of things that relate from the book to our space so we can get an idea of what you’re talking about, that would be great. 

DR: Well I mean, there’s obviously a lot to choose from, so let’s just pull some things out of the air. We could talk about furnishings, for example. There’s a couple of different tactics that relate to that particular subject. So let’s talk about maybe what I call orientation. That is how your furnishings orient you relative to your space. So if we’re thinking about a home office, you know, a lot of times, I think if you walk into somebody’s office at home, you will find the desk, the main work surface very often is butted against the wall, right? It’s kind of pushed up with the long side against the wall, and obviously the chair is in the well there. And you know, there’s some advantages to that, your stuff doesn’t fall over the other side of the desk so much, you can use the back wall as a pin up space, maybe shelving, that’s all fine. But from a strictly psychological standpoint, here’s something probably a lot of people aren’t thinking about, which is the fact that your back Is facing into the space that you are not aware of, who might be entering into that room, or someone approaching you, or your pet even. And while in literal terms today that is not considered a threat because you’re in your home, you would naturally be safe – I imagine – from unwanted intruders, psychologically, we’re actually kind of wired to want to what I call face your space, which is to turn that desk around and look into the room to be able to see what’s in front of you and by doing so also to kind of create a sense of protection because now look, you’ve got the walls behind you, maybe bookcase or whatever. You’ve got another wall, you know, off to a right angle. Maybe there’s a window in the space, so you can look at it and see who might be approaching the house from without, and suddenly you have this sense of psychological safety that you didn’t have when you couldn’t see behind you. 

And this is where to a certain degree, the research speaks broadly. Some people are extremely sensitive to this condition, that is, even just standing in a room with people behind them, they kind of freak out, they get very stressed. Other people, they’re totally not thinking about it. But that’s just kind of differences in whether they’re introverts and so on and so forth. But generally speaking, humans are wired to want to feel safe, obviously because that’s what evolution taught us to do. These are all survival techniques. Back in the day, when we were out in the African Savannah, you would not want to set up your home, your habitat, your camp in the middle of an open field where any old hungry animal could turn you into their lunch, or a hostile tribesmen or whatever. You want it to be sort of at the edge of the field, maybe up on a slope. That’s good, cause now you can really look out over the plains and see what’s happening out there, and you also have a little bit of protection because you know,to climb a slope takes some effort. Maybe there’s some trees or rocks protecting you and your blind spots behind you, your flanks, even overhead. So over time, the people, our ancient ancestors who got the memo about where it’s good to set up habitat, well, it’s good where you have this balance of what’s called prospect, meaning views, seeing what’s in front of you. and refuge, meaning protection. Those people survived, so their genes kept coming down through generation after generation, whereas those that didn’t get the message died off. And that’s why today we’re still wired that way because for one thing, evolution moves incredibly slowly. It’s only in the last couple of hundred years that we’ve gone from living in a purely natural environment to spending nowadays 90% of our time indoors in built space, probably even more because of the pandemic. And that’s good for you and me, it’s good for business, but it’s not necessarily good for our creativity, our health and our happiness, because of some of these conflicts between our sort of Antediluvian selves, our cave people selves and how we live modern life today. So where it’s possible, where you have a choice, it could be highly recommended to turn that desk away from the wall, face into the room, It could be perpendicular to a sidewall, it could be floating, it could be whatever. And as a result, and they have done studies on this, your creativity, your health, your happiness starts to increase. Now I understand there are times when it’s very hard to avoid having your back to a space. Let’s say, especially folks who live in apartments or small spaces, maybe that desk that you use is tucked under a stair, which is a great sort of throw away space, but you can carve it out and put a recess desk in it and automatically as a result, your back is going to be to the space. But fortunately, that’s why it’s good to have 47 other techniques to turn to, you can do things to compensate, to offset the shortcomings of that space in terms of orientation, but restore all of these positive techniques. So for example, you could put up artwork on the back wall there, the surface that you’re looking at under the stairs, you could paint it blue. We could talk about colors. There are certain creativity and health positive colors. Blue is one of them, green is another. You could put up memorabilia, interesting discovery that thinking back in time can actually boost creative thinking and so forth. So you can do all sorts of things. Sometimes just making one change in a space can actually make all the difference in the world in terms of your mental and physical wellbeing. But there’s one thing right off the bat that you could think about in terms of how the psychology of space impacts on our physical and mental states. 

KM: Hmm. I have to rearrange my office here. I’m just totally agreeing with you. Even this morning, I was writing about how I was going to have to put – cause I write to get solutions – I was writing about how I’m going to have a smaller desk and be able to turn it 90 degrees, because I used to have it 90 degrees, but then I inherited this other desk, very long boring story, but I really feel better when I’m facing 90 degrees that way. Cause I can see who’s coming, nobody can surprise me. So now I’m even more motivated to do it this weekend cause you’ve given me the science for why I should do it. And to be honest, half of my desk, it’s only a four foot desk, but I’m wasting at least three and a half feet with the junk on either side of my desk that I don’t really need to have there.

DR: Ah, the question of clutter of course inevitably comes up. I can tell you, this is one technique, or issue let’s say, that there’s actually two sides to the coin. You know, this big question of mess versus not mess, and how does that relate to creativity and well-being. And obviously we have the whole Marie Kondo phenomenon and all of that, but interestingly – and you know, it’s amazing what these scientists come up with as far as subjects to study – they did do a test, they did do an experiment that, you know, what they typically will do is have two groups of people, all solving or attempting to solve the same creative problem, but something in their environment is different between group A and group B. So in this case, it was the messiness of their work surface. They had one group who were trying to solve this creative problem with a messy desk and the other one with a non messy desk, and what they found is that the messy people came up with more original, unique solutions than the non-messy people. 

KM: I could have told you that.

DR: Well, if you had told me that I would’ve argued because I am the opposite of a mess person, I’m a neatnik. And so what does that, does that mean I’m not being creative? Does that mean I’m handcuffing myself? No, not necessarily. And this is key to all of these kinds of scientifically derived findings, which is, you know, at the end of the day, if something makes you happy, makes you pleased, makes you more what they call positive effect, emotionally positive, generally speaking, stick with it, and it’s going to help you with your creativity and your happiness and nevermind what the science says. And that’s again like, something like sound is a good example where your personal individual characteristics can run counter to what the mass of people, the bell curve of the population would suggest. Introverts, you know, if a pin drops, they go crazy. They’re very sensitive to noise. Whereas extroverts on the other end of the spectrum, hey, bring it on, you know, backslapping, talking, yelling, and all that. They love that stuff. And then there’s the rest of us in the middle here, where we have a little bit of both. They have found that actually not silence, but a decibel level of about 70 decibels is a kind of sweet spot for creative thinking, for coming up with new and original ideas, not silence and not, you know, obviously football crowds. So why would that be? Well, I think the idea there is, and these are all theories to try to explain the psychology, is that having a little bit of background noise- and it has to be background, you don’t want to hear the person next to you in the office talking on the telephone and hear every single word they say, because that drives people crazy. That is discernible information. Whereas, you know, rain or crickets or- this is why showers are such a good place for getting ideas. The sound of running water, it’s white noise. That’s just unintelligible mix of frequencies. That’s why people hang out in the Starbucks and the coffee shop, or one of them, your creative types banging away, cause there’s a little bit of background noise, some hubbub that will take just a little bit of edge off of your focus, off of your sort of self-consciousness off of your awareness. Which is that analytical, left brain kind of thinking, versus your right brain creative thinking, which is let’s let the mind wander, let’s jump around, it’s not logic based, it’s not reason based, it’s intuition, it’s imagination. So that little bit of distraction is actually a good thing, but it can’t be too much, obviously where it causes pain or. distraction, and it can’t be too specific where your mind just goes to that conversation way too fast.

KM: So how loud is 70 decibels? 

DR: Yeah, so that is like if you turn on your shower and the water is kind of just beating on the wall there, that’s about 70 decibels. If you go into your coffee shop on a moderately busy day, you know, 15, 20 people kind of chattering in the background, that’s about 70 decibels. You know, I mentioned crickets, if you have those outside your house. Ocean waves, when they crash and you’re kind of on the shore there, that’s in that 70 decibels. When you get to lawn mowers and things, you’re talking over a hundred. A whisper I think is like 20 or 30, somewhere down there. So just to give you a sense of where that falls. And by the way they even, of course, there’s an app for everything, so if you’re a home-based worker or something or remote work, or you do some of your work at home, and it’s like really quiet, you know, there are apps that will make all of these noises from crashing waves to crickets and so forth. Music would be another way that has come of its own ramifications, but there are ways you can make things a little less quiet if that’s your goal.

 KM: Listening to a podcast though, or a book probably isn’t…

DR: Yeah, too specific. You’re focused on the information, which is all good, but it’s a different- it’s not the time you’re going to have an idea popping into your head randomly, or less likely let us say.

KM: Hmm. Like you said, everybody has their own individual preferences and things, but it’s great to just start thinking about these different areas. Maybe people haven’t even thought about it before. Like what do I feel most comfortable with levels of sound? I mean, they already know, but they haven’t really defined it for themselves. So that’s good. 

DR: That’s right, it does make you think about things in a way that you hadn’t thought before. And you might find yourself working counter-intuitively is that, oh, I hadn’t thought that would be the case, but that’s interesting now that I see it, you got a good point and I do react in different ways and so forth. So it’s great to familiarize yourself and you don’t have to use obviously all 48 techniques to make an effective workspace or creative space or a happy and healthy home in general. You know, by the way, all these techniques can apply and can be used in any kind of space, not just a specifically devoted creative space, especially when you’re talking home, because we get ideas and we do things in many different places within the home. All of which in a sense are creative spaces. And the nice thing about home, by the way, and the reason I kind of chose to focus on that first with this book is that home is where statistically speaking, we actually get more creative ideas than in any other setting, including the workplace. And that’s based on surveys of people, asking them where and when they got their ideas. And there’s a whole host of reasons why that is the case. But you know, I mentioned the shower obviously is a classic example, but you might be engaged in a hobby, you might be cooking, all of these places for different reasons can engender creative insights, breakthrough insights. 

KM: Yeah. I mean, I have no idea why, but when I’m doing something else that doesn’t require, that allows my brain to be- when I’m doing something else, like if I’m knitting or if I’m cooking or if I’m weeding, then that’s when my ideas just pop in. Cause I’m not directly thinking about the problem, but then suddenly it just goes like a little balloon. 

DR: Yep. That is the nature of creativity. Of course, people who are in a creative field, they have to deliberately through the work day do some creative work. It’s hard to avoid that, but really creativity primarily happens just at, or even a little below the threshold of consciousness, which is exactly why you’re experiencing that kind of phenomenon. It’s sort of a paradox, which is, one of the best ways to get good ideas is to stop trying to have them, to do other things, because then all of this stuff that’s kind of buried back behind our consciousness threshold, back of mind, they start to bubble to the surface in part, especially when I should say we’re doing things that require minimal conscious thoughts. So if you’re knitting, for example, that’s a great example of, okay, you know what you’re doing, you’re kind of on semi-automatic pilot for at least the number of stitches before you maybe have to change course or something. So you can think of thinking as a zero sum game, we only have a certain amount of mental energy, and where you allocate it, to conscious or unconscious thought can change the nature of your mental outlook. So when your demand for conscious focus, attention goes down like when you’re knitting or taking a shower or doing a hobby or weeding or something, that’s kind of fun and enjoyable, and you really kind of know what you’re doing, you’re on cruise control almost. That’s when the flood gates, all this kind of, think of it as a seesaw, the unconscious side of the mind goes way, way up, all this stuff comes bubbling to the surface and boom, things collide, ideas that you kinda buried, or memories and associations that are kind of sitting back there unused come crashing together and boom, you get that kind of momentary insight. It’s been very well documented. 

KM: Yeah, I love those moments. The director of my graduate program said that the best way to solve your problem, whatever you were trying to figure out, is to ask yourself before you go to sleep and tell your brain, I’d like you to figure this out while you’re sleeping. And then he felt like that would come then in a dream, or you would just know when you woke up, you’d have some more fresh avenues to explore, I guess. 

DR: Yeah. He was a very wise person, this instructor of yours, cause that’s in fact called, it has a name, idea seeding – speaking of garden work and so forth – where yeah, if you have a creative problem that you’re doing for work or for pleasure, whatever, is think about it before you go to sleep. Because of course sleep is the great idea incubator, a percolator, so many great ideas have been had while people are dreaming, while people are asleep. I think Paul McCartney talked about how he got the whole tune for yesterday while sleeping away, while dreaming away and he woke up, you know, and threw it all down. And that’s a key thing, which is to have by your bedside a pad and a pencil or whatever kind of recording instrument you have at the light. Because when you wake up, you want to grab those ideas. And whether that’s in the middle of the night or in the morning, you want to get those ideas down on paper, because very likely you will forget them otherwise, that’s just the way our brains work, it’s called working memory. We have to keep replenishing that, you can only hold so much information in conscious storage at any one time. And then it gets shuffled off into unconsciousness or forgotten altogether in some cases. So try to find something that will allow you to capture those ideas in whatever half conscious or fully conscious state you are. But there’s so many things that have been discovered, scientific discoveries, all sorts of great cultural products and inventions while people were sleeping, so your instructor was right on the money.

KM: That’s so exciting to me. I mean, I don’t understand a lot of how the brain works honestly, but the idea that ideas will pop into your head, I just, I love that because you never know when it’s going to happen. So that’s, you know, it could be a great day, you could have an awesome idea that day, you don’t even know. But what I also find exciting is that people have control over their spaces and if they know what might make them more comfortable, they can plan for that, you know? So if they consciously go into trying to make whatever space it is feel a certain way, there is a way to do that. It’s not just luck. 

DR: Exactly. That’s why I call these tactics. Another term I use is design triggers. And I’m using the word design there partly, and it’s sort of traditional aesthetic sense, but also the way we use the word when we say, well, I’m doing something by design, meaning deliberately, intentionally, knowledgeably. Nearly everything about a physical space is going to be done via human agency, right? Nothing’s just plopped down from the sky. So by understanding the connection between those decisions that you make about what your space is going to be like and connecting them to known outcomes that stem from those specific decisions and those particular components, you can hopefully engender those outcomes to happen more. And this takes place, by the way, a lot in healthcare design. People in hospital design now are using a lot of this science to create hospital rooms, patient rooms that are designed to actually advance the healing process. There’s great material on how, for example, just the fact that some patients in the hospital happened to look out on to trees that have been planted in a courtyard, outside their hospital rooms. They were on like the second and third floors. So they were looking straight into the canopies of trees that, you know, somebody had decided to plant in this courtyard, however many years before. And so what they are able to do is to compare those patient outcomes for those people in those rooms with say another group of people in almost identical rooms that were farther down the corridor, but when they looked out, they had a clear shot across this courtyard that faced onto a brick wall of another part of the hospital because somebody decided they were only going to plant the trees down at one end. They had no idea of this phenomenon when all of these decisions happened, but what they found is that the people who look at trees had actually shorter hospital stays, required less medication and had fewer complications than the ones who looked out on the brick wall. So I mean, the power of the environment to influence how we think, feel and act, it can’t get any more profound than that. We’re talking about affecting us at our core physiologies at the level of, without being melodramatic, life and death. So just imagine with that knowledge now what you can do to say, okay, so in this case I see the point here, which is to bring some nature in. And that could be, if you’re fortunate enough to have a window that looks out onto foliage, that’s great, into natural terrain, whatever your circumstances. But if you don’t, you know, if you live in an urban apartment, well, how about putting a plant on your desk? Really, something simple as that, or I mentioned the color green, that has actually been linked, where they measured people’s ability to solve creative problems by just giving them two seconds. And some of these triggers happen very fast. Two seconds of seeing the color green, boom, that group performed better around their creative problem solving exercises than ones that just jumped into it. So lots of different ways to bring nature in, even if you don’t have necessarily beautiful scenery just outside your windows. So that’s a very big part of what I talk about in the book. And as I say, there’s lots of different ways to do that. 

KM: So you’d mentioned blue also. Like I love clouds and I love looking out my window above my desk where it’s a blue sky often, and sometimes it has little clouds in it. And it seems kind of ridiculous, but anyway, I just wonder if that blue, cause I feel like I look out there, I can get kind of lost in it cause it’s, you know, of course the sky. So is that what blue, people associate blue with the sky and so therefore feel kind of that limitless feeling when they look at it?

DR: Yes, and lots more beyond that. I mean, you touched on a lot of things there. So first of all, when you look at clouds, this brings into play something called fractal geometry, or fractals. So fractals are very much part of nature. It basically describes a phenomenon where the same shape is repeated again and again, but at larger and larger scales. The classic example, if you look at the section of a Nautilus shell, right? Those chambers, they kind of whirl out. They swirl out from the center point and they get bigger and bigger and bigger, obviously leaves on trees. You got little leaves, but then the same shape is just repeated a little bigger on the next leaf, cause he got born earlier, and so on and so forth. And somehow fractals are one of these signals that the brain records, which brings us back to back in those African Savanna days, a billion years ago, the presence of nature, of natural growth. That’s what fractals kind of record. A pattern of growth says to your brain, you know, you’re in a good place. There’s growth going on here, there’s food, there’s water, you’re going to survive. These are all positive signals and boom, you have that kind of mental positive outlook. Blue is a couple of things going on here. Yes, there is absolutely an association with nature, blue skies, blue waters. These are all considered positive affect stimulants. They make us happy when it’s blue skies out for just some of the reasons I discussed. There’s also a kind of spatial element involved with blue that I talk about in the book, which is that blue is a recessive color, optically speaking. So for folks listening, that means a surface that’s rendered in a blue color will feel optically, it will have the illusion of moving away from the eye. Whereas let’s say if that same surface were painted red, which is a warm color, that surface will appear to be moving towards the eye, that’s more of an advancing sense. So the idea of a blue – say walls, the most typical example – is that that makes a space feel larger. Then say if that exact same room were painted in the red or a warm color, people would walk in and say, well, that room’s bigger than this room, even though they’re exactly the same size, is the red room is smaller than the blue. So it’s an optical illusion, all of which is to say that the more open you can make your space feel, and that doesn’t mean big, just openness. If you have that window, you’ve got an outlet, right? You’ve got a visual connection to the outside world, which is always going to feel a lot bigger than anything we could ever imagine inside. The moment you can create a sense of openness that does, what does that do to your brain? It opens your mind up to new ideas. This is kind of a classic definition of creative outlook, opening yourself up to new ways of doing things, new ways of seeing the world. The more closed in this space feels, the more analytic left brain we tend to be, because that’s about focus thinking, right, when you’re like going over a spreadsheet and you’re crunching numbers, your eyes are literally in your brain as well, really focused on that material, and you’re thinking very mathematically, very analytically, which is not a bad thing. It’s just different from creative thinking, which wants to be, hey, anything goes, let’s open ourselves up to the possibilities to things we otherwise wouldn’t consider. So blue, and this is the thing about all of these scientific findings when it comes to trying to explain why they have this effect on us that they do, we have to be delving into theory, right. We can’t prove why people react to blue and green in the way they do with the same, let’s say logical certainty we can prove that two plus two equals four and whole integers. It’s just, we just can’t do that. But it’s almost like you’re a lawyer making an argument, you amass your evidence, your research, you kind of put it into some kind of coherent argument for why you think these things have these effects, and you pitch your ideas and let the marketplace of ideas, scientists, other people decide which ones are going to fly and which ones aren’t. And a lot of times the theories can also mutually exist. Another thing I said about blue aren’t mutually contradictory. They could all be happening, they could all be contributing to why blue has this effect on us. But blue is the world’s most popular color, and that tends to span cultures and national boundaries. And there, you can kind of sense the universality of the human genetic profile, which is that we’re all kind of born to some degree wired to find the positive in nature and nature based inputs.

KM: Well blue is a great color, I think. Hard to argue with that. Well how can people find your book? Is it on Amazon? Do you have an audio book of it? 

DR: It is on Amazon and pretty much all your other traditional online booksellers, Barnes And Noble, Google, et cetera, et cetera. There is an ebook version, there’s both the hardcover version and the ebook version. You know, I love eBooks for my research, especially cause I can highlight, I can do all this stuff, I can search and so forth. But for this book I do recommend the hard cover, at least as a first pass, because it has a lot of color photos in it. It’s sort of material and physical in a way. And the imagery just comes through better on the printed page in this case than in the ebook version. But I’ve had people actually get both, so they can kind of do their note taking and copying in the ebook and they can enjoy the physical book as well. So the name of the book, just to give you the full title is My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation. I almost forgot it myself. And as I say, you might also find it in your local bookstore. We do like to support them as well. 

KM: Well, and what about social media? Do you have a website?

DR: Yeah, my website is donaldrattner.com, and Rattner is spelled with two T’s. That’s very important. There is another branch that only has one, but I’m the two T version. And I’m also on your Facebook and your LinkedIn and your Instagram as well.

KM: It’s Donald Rattner with two T’s. Okay, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate your time. 

DR: Thank you for having me, I enjoyed the conversation. 

KM: I’m going to order your book and I’ll probably be in touch after with some questions.

DR: Wonderful, I’d love it. 

KM: I’m looking forward to it and I am going to change my desk orientation and my desk in the next week. I’ll send you pictures.

DR: There you go, I’ve done my good deed for the day.

KM: You have, and for all my clients who will get their creativity faster from me. 

DR: Exactly. 

KM: Yeah. But I do think I should take more time off to weed and knit and do other things too. I mean, that’s a good argument for that, right?

DR: Absolutely. You have my blessing. 

KM: Thank you.