Recreating immersive natural environments to stimulate employee creativity: we’re testing it out for you with The Lab in The Bag technologies

Spending time in nature feels good. You've probably experienced it yourself: whether in the mountains, the forest, or by the sea, you feel at peace, you lose track of time… and sometimes you even come home with new ideas. This isn't a coincidence! It's science. Numerous studies in management, psychology, and neuroscience have shown that natural environments foster creativity. 

At Repères, we've launched an ambitious research program: to study the effect of physical and sensory work environments on creativity. In this article, we take you behind the scenes of our first series of experiments, focused on the effect of immersive natural environments on idea generation.

Creating is essential to the innovation process

Whether you're a product manager, innovation lead, designer, or sensory specialist: you need creativity! And yes, creativity is deeply intertwined with the innovation process. No creativity means no agility and no breakthroughs in product development.

At Repères, we're constantly seeking new ways to support your development. For nearly 10 years, our company, The Lab In The Bag, has been developing immersive multisensory rooms designed to be integrated directly into your workspaces. These systems deliver images and sound, combined with a wide range of sensory effects (scent, mist, airflow, temperature control), to instantly transport you to the environment of your choice. Although our rooms can be used in many ways, we have set out on a whole new path: providing a research‑backed protocol that can be directly implemented in your The Lab In The Bag room to stimulate your teams' creativity.

Three series of experiments to identify the optimal conditions for creativity

To design this protocol, we are using one of our largest immersive installations: the 80‑square‑meter room at the Lyfe Institute (Ecully), equipped with 360° screens and numerous sensory devices (sound, scent, mist, airflow, and temperature control). This work is being conducted by our PhD student Lou‑Anne Delaroque, under the supervision of François Abiven, CEO of Repères, as well as Guy Parmentier (creativity researcher) and Marielle Salvador (sensory marketing researcher).

Through a systematic literature review conducted beforehand, we highlighted the importance of natural work environments in stimulating creativity. At the same time, the colors present in these environments were also identified as key factors. It is widely accepted that solving a creative problem relies on two complementary mechanisms, which individuals alternate between: divergent thinking, which involves generating a large number of varied ideas, and convergent thinking, which involves selecting or retaining only a single solution among the ideas generated. Studies thus show that cooler colors such as green and blue are more conducive to divergent thinking, while warmer colors such as red or orange are more conducive to convergent thinking.

We therefore compared two natural environments in the immersive The Lab In The Bag room to measure their effect on creativity: a natural environment dominated by green and blue, and a natural environment dominated by red and orange. To achieve a 360° visual experience, we used equirectangular 2:1 aspect ratio pictures imported into the immersive room's interface. Natural soundtracks were also added to match the visual environments (birdsong and the sound of water lapping for the blue/green environment, cicadas and wind for the red/orange environment).

To measure the effect of environments on creativity, we designed a two‑phase activity, one requiring divergent thinking and the other convergent thinking. In the first phase, participants were asked to generate as many unique travel activity ideas as possible. Then, in the second phase, the objective was to select one idea from those generated and develop it in order to convince a travel agency to adopt it. A questionnaire was then completed to identify the psychological mechanisms at play during the session. Each session lasted a total of approximately 30 minutes.

Three rounds of experiments were conducted, involving a total of 160 participants:

• Experimentation 1 : Participants were placed in either a dark forest environment, a dark desert environment, or a light control environment (uniform gray background). The creative activity and questionnaire were administered and completed on a touchscreen tablet with a keyboard.
• Experimentation 2 : The procedure was the same as in Experiment 1, except that the gray control environment was dark.
• Experimentation 3 : Participants were placed in either a light forest environment or a light desert environment. There was no control environment. The prompts for the creative activity were directly integrated into the visual environment, and participants wrote their responses on a sheet of paper. The questionnaire was then completed on a cell phone.

Preliminary results and findings

Preliminary results show that, across the various sessions, the natural environment with a predominantly green/blue color scheme tends to foster more original ideas during the first phase of the activity (divergent thinking phase). A comparison with the gray control environments (light in Experiment 1, dark in Experiment 2) also revealed the importance of lighting on creative performance. Thus, a dimly lit environment tends to reduce individuals' creativity, regardless of the environment's content.

Among the underlying psychological mechanisms we chose to study, the loss of time perception (a component of the flow state) proved to be a decisive marker of creative performance. Both natural environments also passed the R3M Score test, a tool developed exclusively by Repères to assess emotional arousal in response to a stimulus. The results showed that the green/blue‑dominated natural environment is perceived more positively than the red/orange‑dominated environment. This difference in emotional activation could explain the results obtained on the originality score in the first part of the creative activity, which favored the green/blue‑dominated environment.

What can we take away from this first phase of experiments? 

• A natural, immersive audiovisual environment with a green/blue color scheme can foster creativity, particularly in terms of the originality of the ideas generated (during the divergence phase).
• A minimum level of brightness must be maintained so as not to hinder the creative process.
• Positive emotional engagement and a loss of sense of time are key factors when it comes to fostering creativity through sensory environments.

To continue investigating the effect of sensory environments on creativity, we will further explore the possibilities of The Lab In The Bag immersive rooms, including the use of scent diffusion. Stay tuned to find out what's next!