ASSESSING CREATIVITY IN ARCHITECTURE DESIGN STUDIO

ABSTRACT

Creativity is an original cognitive ability and thinking process. Promoting creativity is particularly important in Architecture education. In fact, creativity is acknowledged in the architecture design pedagogy as an essential component of the design process. Though creativity has thought to be an innate ability, research has shown that it can also be developed and cultivated. This study  explores  the  impact  of  creativity  enhancing techniques on student’s creativity in design studio and suggests a framework for the same. A survey on creativity was conducted on architecture students and their design studio instructors of two colleges (Jamia Millia Islamia and IGDTUW) to gain insight about perceptions on creativity and current design studio practices. The results showed that though the importance of creative thinking is well acknowledged in design education, very few conscious efforts are being made to actually train architecture students consciously towards creative thinking. A detailed study of creativity enhancing techniques in various other disciplines was done. With an experimental study conducted in second year design studio of IGDTUW, the impact of using certain conscious efforts and creativity techniques was shown using Amabile’s Consensual Assessment Technique as a pre and posttest to evaluate student’s work on various identified parameters of creativity. The pre and post test scores judged by four senior faculties independently showed a significant increase in all parameters. On the basis of the literature study and experiment, this paper proposes a framework for incorporating these techniques in the design studio process.

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