Creative Practices Embodied, Embedded, and Enacted in Architectural Settings: Toward an Ecological Model of Creativity

Abstract

Memoires by eminently creative people often describe architectural spaces and qualities they believe instrumental for their creativity. However, places designed to encourage creativity have had mixed results, with some found to decrease creative productivity for users. This may be due, in part, to lack of suitable empirical theory or model to guide design strategies. Relationships between creative cognition and features of the physical environment remain largely uninvestigated in the scientific literature, despite general agreement among researchers that human cognition is physically and socially situated. This paper investigates what role architectural settings may play in creative processes by examining documented first person and biographical accounts of creativity with respect to three central theories of situated cognition. First, the embodied thesis argues that cognition encompasses both the mind and the body. Second, the embedded thesis maintains that people exploit features of the physical and social environment to increase their cognitive capabilities. Third, the enaction thesis describes cognition as dependent upon a person’s interactions with the world. Common themes inform three propositions, illustrated in a new theoretical framework describing relationships between people and their architectural settings with respect to different cognitive processes of creativity. The framework is intended as a starting point toward an ecological model of creativity, which may be used to guide future creative process research and architectural design strategies to support user creative productivity.

What the Jeweller’s Hand Tells the Jeweller’s Brain: Tool Use, Creativity and Embodied Cognition

“…In her account of creative practice, Malinin (2016) proposes that creative cognition is embodied, embedded and enacted. In part this reflects the observation that skilled practitioners do not distinguish between the tool as an external artefact and their hands but, rather, feel the tool as part of themselves (Baber 2003;Sennett 2008).…”

Sources of Embodied Creativity: Interactivity and Ideation in Contact Improvisation

“…They focus on how continuous engagements provide progressively elaborated task solutions or lead to the negotiation of new interaction frames. This school of thinking has recently spawned important enactive approaches to creativity [ 30 , 31 ]. Interactional self-organization and other complexity-theory concepts have been brought into play by sports and dance scientists, who study domains such as soccer, rugby or basketball that are co-improvised as well as creative [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ].…”

“…They focus on how continuous engagements provide progressively elaborated task solutions or lead to the negotiation of new interaction frames. This school of thinking has recently spawned important enactive approaches to creativity [ 30 , 31 ].…”

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Design Creativity

“…Also, with the increasing influence of ideas from emotional decision-making, embodied cognition, and situated cognition, cognitive neuroscience is equipped to study higher-order processes that are subjective, environmentally situated, and culturally biased, like design cognition. 82 Judicious use of methodologies and tools of cognitive neuroscience in conjunction with design research methods can give a lot of insight on the neural correlates of design cognition. This can benefit cognitive scientist to understand a unique higher cognitive skill and designer researchers to design better training programs.…”