Requisite Variety in Seating?

Image by Larry White from Pixabay

The tumbler on Chairs of the Hunt Library, brought to my attention by my EdLab colleague Sabarish Raghupathy, highlights the wide variety of seating options available in North Carolina State’s Hunt Library. The varied chairs clearly make the Hunt Library a lovelier environment, but did you know that they might also make it a more creative environment or at least one where creative solutions to problems might more easily emerge?

The law of requisite variety suggests that complex problems require equally complex approaches to address them successfully. As we think about environments for creative problem solving work, we might consider the ways in which the design of the environment, including the seating options, can be developed to provide variety in the physical environment to encourage variety in problem solving approaches. To test out this idea for yourself pay attention to your approach to problems in an environment in which there is uniformity (perhaps of seating) and then again in an environment with more variety.

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