Creativity in product design education: Understanding the learning environment

Abstract

This paper examines current research into the relationship between creativity and the immediate physical environment, and how it has been found to influence the creativity of undergraduate product design students. This includes conducting an experiment testing the familiar physical environment of the students, and exploring studies about how taking students into a different, more immersive environment affects learning and stimulates creativity. By comparing the result of that experiment to theories about how environments can affect creativity, the score difference is not statistically significant overall even though one of the test groups scores marginally higher than the others. This outcome maybe occurs due to the type of experiment chosen, the scoring method or the test environments. The paper concludes by outlining plans for further investigation as part of a recently commenced PhD research project.