The 301-day design-build project will relocate the City Clerk's Office to the ground floor and add a grab-and-go food area, funded partly through Measure Z reserves.
Welcome back, you expressive little pictographers! Last week we tapped, swiped, and squinted our way across the mini emotional wordscape known as emoji. Did you translate a favorite face into an expressive sound effect? Maybe you discovered that the “thumbs up” you send every day is doing more social work than your actual thumb. However you chose to sprinkle symbols across your week, I hope it helped you find a few more ways to say what words alone sometimes fail to deliver.
This week, as Riverside spring tries on every outfit in the closet, we’re turning our attention to a small wall-mounted mood enhancer: the thermostat. Here’s my take on the current season. Heater in the morning. Air conditioning by late afternoon. The thermostat is there for us when weather and our own fashion sense let us down.
A thermostat is simple enough. Keep a space at a comfortable and consistent temperature. The thermostat, credited to Warren S. Johnson (1883), was created because people disliked manually managing temperature 24/7. That fact makes me wonder about how much of my creative energy gets spent managing “my climate” instead of making things?
Creative life has a preferred temperature too. When a creative deadline looms, that’s when I decide I can’t do anything until I’ve put together the right playlist, the right amount of natural light, the right amount of hydration. With a little effort, I can remove the creative output altogether and just recalibrate my artistic thermostat all day.
Our dependence on these conveniences deserves reflection. The thermostat trains us to expect immediate, personally beneficial, results. Too warm? Press a button. Too cold? Press the other button. Too quiet? Ask a speaker to play rain sounds. Too bored? Open a glowing rectangle and let the algorithm determine your next mood swing.
Our creative dreams now strive to exist alongside these tools, apps, and freedoms of choice. The question isn’t whether technology shapes our creativity. It clearly does. The better question is: can we shape it back? I say yes.
Find your thermostat or a picture of one. It may be a smart panel glowing like a spaceship control, an old beige dial made of a now-banned plastic, or one locked behind a box that only the office manager can access. Give it several minutes of creative attention with one or more of these temptastic nudges:
Read the Room: Look closely at your thermostat. Study its numbers, arrows, buttons, fingerprints, scratches, and obscure symbols. Sketch it as if it were a face; your own climate oracle perhaps!
Set Point Self-Portrait: Thermoception is your sense of temperature. Notice where your body feels warm or cool right now: hands, neck, feet, shoulders, forehead. Write a quick “weather report” for yourself. Are you partly cloudy with a chance of motivation? Experiencing a low-pressure system near your inbox? Turn that forecast into a poem, doodle, voice memo, or tiny dramatic monologue.
HVAC Symphony: Listen for the sounds of temperature control: the clicks, hums, whooshes and rattles that tell you everything is working just fine…or you need a professional. Record a few seconds or just imitate the sounds like a foley artist. Give your composition a title like Air Conditioning in B Minor or The Heat Drops a Beat.
Comfort Audit: Touch three surfaces in your creative environment: desk, wall, window, chair, coffee mug, file folder, door. Notice temperature and texture. Rearrange one small thing to make the space more creatively welcoming. Move a box. Add a coaster. Change the art on the wall.
Dial for Smile: Proprioception is your sense of where your body is in space, so use your whole body as a thermostat. Stand in the middle of the room and slowly “turn the dial” with your arm, shoulder, or entire torso. Move from frozen to overheated, from tense to relaxed, from stuck to flowing. Make it a dance, a stretch, a silent performance, or a two-minute ritual before you make that awkward phone call.
The thermostat reminds me that creativity does not happen in a vacuum. It fights against oscillating calendars, moods, to-do’s, seasonal allergies, family dynamics, and Wi-Fi speeds. This week, fiddle around with the thermostat of your creative life. Not to optimize every minute into productivity. Just to notice. What could use a warmup? What’s in need of a cool down? What could do with a blast of fresh air from an opened window?
Make one small adjustment, then give yourself several minutes to play inside the new conditions. Creativity, like comfort, is rarely a permanent setting. It is something we return to, adjust, and live with by degrees.
This column was written with the help of ChatGPT, used here as a creative climate control collaborator.
