Friday, January 7, 2011

Down to Earth Again


Back in the office today, I started to consider all of the different  environments I have been working in this week – airplanes, airports, cars, hotels, various offices, a training room at the new Madison Target, a restaurant, and then my studio/office at home and my actual office @ Target Headquarters.  It’s amazing how adaptable we can be in temporary situations. 
Regarding my workspace at Target, you probably imagine an office with lots of red and fun spaces, but our desks are grey and beige cubicles and the office decor is mostly white on beige on grey with a splash of red here and there. 
My workspace at home, in contrast,  is pretty fun and bright – we have not quite finished the remodel started last summer, but it is close to done.  We turned our spare bedroom into a studio space so I did not have to cut pieces for models on the bed anymore.  The room is pretty well organized, but I have some clutter around which I guess makes it feel more like a studio space. 
At work, I have a lot of projects, which tend to fill up my workstation with piles of project files… one of my co-workers asked if we had a lot of stuff in our house, too, based on what he saw at my desk.  But we keep our house pretty neat and tidy.  It started when my husband was running his firm out of our house 16 years ago – we needed to always be presentable if a client stopped by.  Clean and neat  was taken to the extreme when we were trying to sell our old house 5 years ago – it felt like we lived in a museum/hotel. 
Workspace (and living space) can have a profound impact on behavior – I wanted to become a psychologist before I decided to study architecture and I have always had an interest in behavior and environment.  My cluttery room at home feels creative and liberating.  My cluttery desk at work feels limiting and constricting.  I should try to figure out how to make my workspace feel more like my studio space.  It might even be easy.

 my cluttery work-surface!
my not so cluttery desk.  My concrete poetry is showing! 

1 comment:

  1. I like that you have a mayline next to our computer. At our office, everyone has a computer and two screens and a desk with a mayline.... :)

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