Development of a theoretical framework to facilitate creative process in architectural design education

Abstract

Creativity is the key for a progressive human evolution. Our creative ability places us as the superior species on earth. The need to be creative is felt within every industry and construction industry being engaged with original products finds it more challenging. Architecture is an art. It is not mere art it is an art of science, art of technology, predominantly an art of social existence. Architectural residuals possess the ability to recite the legends of vibrant societies that prevailed, the economic conditions, aesthetic sense and the technological advancements of a particular era. As with many other professions within contemporary competitive consumer society finding creative solutions is vital for its survival. Education is the key to foster creativity and developing strategies are based on theoretical understanding. However creativity being studied by different disciplines the research literature on theory is rich in both depth and breadth. Looking into creativity theories it reveals that fostering creativity in education posits its roots on considering the socio-cultural, cognitive-psychological, neuropsychological, neurobiological understanding as well as developing person-oriented, process-oriented and product-oriented approaches. Being placed at the highest level in each education domains creative interventions are essential in education programs to achieve creative outcomes. In developing creative interventions one needs to develop a theoretical framework to base its model. This requires understanding the domain specific influencing factors and the demanding orientation. Within architectural education design studio i? a key in nurturing creativity and it is organised into a process. Therefore the study explores the impact of strengthening of the creative process as a strategy to develop an intervention where the pertaining theories are assembled into an integrated theoretical framework termed "theoretical model of creative design process". The student performance in an interior architecture module was carefully investigated. Research design is an action research method where data is generated through a series of task performance. It was revealed that there is a significant relationship between the performance in creative process phases and design performance while the design mark after the intervention shows a significant improvement.