With more days spent working from home, many of us have started to think about how to arrange the space around our desks. If you place one small painting on a desk that holds only a computer and papers, does anything change? Here I have gathered research on workspaces and decoration, feng shui ideas, and a few things to consider when you place a painting near your desk.
An experiment comparing bare and decorated workspaces
In 2010, Craig Knight and Alex Haslam of the University of Exeter in the UK published an experiment on how the design of a workspace affects people’s well-being and how much work they get done. The paper appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
Participants spent an hour doing office tasks in one of four rooms:
- Lean: just a desk, a chair, and something to write with
- Enriched: prints of plant photographs and potted plants, placed by the researchers
- Empowered: the same decorations, which participants could arrange as they liked or remove
- Disempowered: participants arranged the decorations, and then the researchers put everything back the way it had been
People felt better and did better work in the decorated room than in the bare one. And the best results came from the room people decorated themselves. Economist and writer Tim Harford, describing the experiment, reports that people in the self-decorated room got about 30% more done than in the lean room, and about 15% more than in the enriched room. In the room where their arrangement was undone, those benefits shrank.
Being able to choose what sits near your desk seems to matter in itself.
In feng shui, east is the direction of work
In feng shui, each direction is said to suit certain colors. A feng shui interior article from Rakuten describes east as the direction of work and career, matched with green and blue, and northwest as the direction of business, with gold and silver as its basic colors.
One way to enjoy this is to look at which direction the wall by your desk faces and choose a painting that includes that direction’s colors. How colors and directions are matched can differ between schools, so I think it works best as a gentle hint.
Things to check when placing art near your desk
- Where your eyes land when you look up: A spot that comes naturally into view when you look away from the screen. The wall in front of you or beside your computer works well
- A smaller size: On a desk, a small frame or a piece you can lean against the wall is easy to live with and stays out of the way
- How it looks on video calls: A painting within the camera’s view can sometimes start a conversation
- Choosing it yourself: As the experiment suggests, placing “the painting you want to see” with your own hands may matter most
From someone who keeps my painting beside her computer
A woman in her forties who commissioned a painting as she started a new job told me: “Every time I see it, I feel as if I’m being praised, and it makes me happy. It eased my worries and nerves about the new job, and I’m able to work with confidence and ease. The commissioned art is still my phone’s lock screen, and I keep the painting beside my computer too.” Having a painting made for you right where you work can be a small daily support.
My commissioned art begins with listening to the person’s story before I paint. When a painting is meant for a home office or desk, I also ask about the work they do, the space and light around the desk, and how they would like to feel when they look at it during the day, and I think about color and size together with that. Paintings for yourself or someone dear to you are described on the PERSONAL ORDER ART page, and paintings for companies and clinics on the BUSINESS ART page.
Summary
- In the University of Exeter experiment, people felt better and did better work in rooms with plants and decoration than in a bare room
- The best results came from rooms people decorated themselves. Being able to choose matters
- In feng shui, east is the direction of work, matched with green and blue, and northwest the direction of business, with gold and silver
- Near your desk, place a smaller “painting you want to see” where your eyes land when you look up
Sources
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (The relative merits of lean, enriched, and empowered offices) Craig Knight, S. Alexander Haslam, 2010
TED Ideas (Why every office should scrap its clean desk policy) Tim Harford, 2016
Rakuten Ichiba (西の方角にはこの色を取り入れて！方角別、風水インテリアカラー)
Mermaid nao official website (VOICES)
