NiallOK’s Blog

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I always knew it! - Ever since I worked for a company called Cyrona and our design & development team was moved to a different office with a higher ceiling - partially because of the need for more space and partially, allegedly, for the creative benefits created by the new environment (more space above your head, less space in your head) - I always knew that your work space and the amount of free space in it - particularly that between you and the ceiling - affected your productivity. I never needed any scientific studies to prove that for me… but now I have one…

Research by Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu, marketing experts at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, suggests that the way people think and act is stronly affected by ceiling height. According to a report on innovations-report.de,:

“When a person is in a space with a 10-foot ceiling, they will tend to think more freely, more abstractly,” said Meyers-Levy. “They might process more abstract connections between objects in a room, whereas a person in a room with an 8-foot ceiling will be more likely to focus on specifics.”

The authors theorized that when reasonably salient, a higher versus a lower ceiling can stimulate the concepts of freedom versus confinement, respectively. This causes people to engage in either more free-form, abstract thinking or more detail-specific thought. Thus, depending on what the task at hand requires, the consequences of the ceiling could be positive or negative.

There’s a requirement for my next home … higher ceilings!