In many ways, the creative process is a mystery. But there are proven techniques to stimulate it. Start with a messy room. In a dark and cold country. Oh, and don't forget to master an instrument.

Minimalist office design is the mantra at many companies now, but University of Minnesota professors speculated that such tidy spaces encourage conformity. Kathleen D. Vohls, a professor of marketing, wrote in The Times that those subjected to messiness were likely "to avoid convention and favor new directions."

So she and two colleagues set up experiments to test whether a cluttered room fostered innovation. Subjects who worked in a messy room had more creative ideas when asked to imagine new ways to use Ping-Pong balls. (Their answers included making ice trays out of them and attaching them to the bottom of chairs to protect floors.)

These subjects were judged to generate solutions that were 28 percent more creative on average, and were five times more likely to come up with "highly creative" ideas than those in tidy rooms.

"Clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow," Ms. Vohls wrote.

It might even help if it's a mess outside. The Silicon Valley gaming giant Electronic Arts, trying to fend off fierce competition from handset games, is counting on its development studio in Sweden, called Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment (DICE), which is working on its latest version of the bloody and dramatic Battlefield series. Sweden has not been at war since the Napoleonic era, but has long been a hothouse for budding techies.

And it has that weather.

"Nine out of 12 months here, it's pretty dark, it's pretty rainy, it's pretty snowy," Karl Magnus Troedsson, DICE's general manager, told The Times. "Sitting indoors together with friends, doing things with computers, it's a pretty comfortable hobby."

Another way to stimulate creative thinking, Joanne Lipman reported in The Times, is to study music seriously. Many successful people told her that mastering an instrument helped open up their minds and enhanced other qualities: "Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present and the future simultaneously."

James Wolfensohn, the former chief of the World Bank who once played cello at Carnegie Hall, told her that music functions as a "hidden language." When he ran the bank, he traveled to more than 100 countries, often taking in performances (and occasionally joining in on a borrowed cello). It helped him understand "the culture of people, as distinct from their balance sheet," he told Ms. Lipman.

And playing well isn't required. Woody Allen, who has a weekly gig in New York and has toured internationally with his New Orleans jazz band, says playing the clarinet is a diversion, and one that he's not particularly talented at. "I have to practice every single day to be as bad as I am," he said.

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The New York Times

(China Daily 10/27/2013 page9)