Architecture and the imaginary: text stimulus to improve students' creativity with nonlinear design process
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.
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.
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.
The architectural design studio curriculum developed through this study identifies that students were able to focus their creative abilities on ways to express creative thinking, communicate, discuss and acquire knowledge through a nonlinear design process. This study could be useful not only for students but also for professors, especially in the context of design education. Architectural design studios could encourage students to design and use all types of design stages. In addition, exposing students to stimuli and raising their awareness of creative ideas could help them to acquire their own design methodologies that strengthen their convincing ideas.
