How the type of methodology used, when working in a natural environment, affects the designer's creativity

Abstract

The study of the mechanisms linked to creativity has become a topic of great interest in various scientific fields in recent decades. One area in which a particularly large amount of research has been conducted is on the positive effect of natural environments on creativity. Yet, none of these studies have focused on the interaction that may arise with the design method used. That is, they consider the empowering effect of nature on creativity to be something general, without taking into account other factors that may influence it, such as the type of methodology used. This paper therefore aims to go a step further and investigate how the type of design methodology used—intuitive or logical—in a simulated natural environment affects the designer’s creativity. The analysis of both the design process and its outcomes shows that the main differences in the way of working with design methodologies occur mainly in the case of intuitive methodologies, helping designers to improve the quality of their outcomes.

Relaxing or arousing environments (through color and music) for fostering designer’s creativity

“…The creativity of the results was evaluated using the method developed by Shah et al (2003), in which four effective parameters are taken into account to measure the creativity of the ideas generated: quantity, variety, novelty and quality. This metric has been used in many researches for evaluating creativity (Chan et al, 2011;Linsey et al, 2011;Sarkar & Chakrabarti, 2011, Royo et al, 2021, Chulvi et al, 2022. Moreover, this metric has been chosen because, in addition of the dimensions of novelty and quality of the solutions, which 8 are the most common features measured in product creative metrics (Chulvi et al, 2012), it also measures the quantity and variety of ideas during the ideation phase.…”

Unveiling the impact of design methods on problem-solving performance in STEM education

“…can the conclusions obtained be applied to the workplace? Most of the studies that compare methods' performance work with a small number of participants and do not follow similar procedures, impeding any statistical analysis, while reaching conflicting conclusions (Cano-Moreno, Arenas-Reina, Sánchez-Martínez & Cabanellas-Becerra, 2021;Chulvi, Royo, Agost, Felip & García-García, 2022;Dumas & Schmidt, 2015;Kannengiesser & Gero, 2015).…”