Architecture and the imaginary: text stimulus to improve students' creativity with nonlinear design process
ISSN: 2631-6862
Article publication date: 29 April 2022
Issue publication date: 20 October 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to examine whether a text stimulus could enhance students' imagination and thus enhance their creativity in the architectural design studio. The assumption is that adopting the text stimulus in the conceptual design stage would support students' imagination through a nonlinear design process, and ultimately produce the creative values of design outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
A curriculum that adopts a text stimulus was developed and used for first-year university students. The aim was to implement an architectural setting to stimulate students' imagination with a framework for creativity evaluation. The study focused not only on the design process that characterizes the generation of concepts and ideas, but also on the processes related to the creative practices that students need for developing their own expression methods to solve problems they encounter.
Findings
The results show that design education that emphasizes the imaginary could enhance students' creative thinking, thus leading to creative design. As a training tool in the design studio, the diversity of interpretation following the text stimulus was revealed to provoke a nonlinear design process and to eventually enhance students' originality, differential and inventiveness, which are associated with the creativity criteria for evaluation.
Originality/value
The study explores the translation of imaginary spaces from text into spatial design as a conceptual tool in order to characterize and support creativity throughout design education in the architectural design studio.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge our students for participating their works as part of the content for this study.
Funding: This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A5A2A01041497).
Citation
Park, E.J., Kim, D.-H. and Kim, M.J. (2022), "Architecture and the imaginary: text stimulus to improve students' creativity with nonlinear design process", Archnet-IJAR, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 637-652. https://doi.org/10.1108/ARCH-12-2021-0367
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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