Implementing Unconventional Virtual Environments for Enhancing Creativity in Architecture Pedagogy

What can be extracted as a common definition amongst near 100 different definitions of creativity according to different disciplines is: Creativity is a new combination of what you have in your inventory of experiences + intuition. It can be considered that expanding the inventory of experiences can gradually help in novel combination of experiences and intuition. To support and promote such an expansion, experiencing a virtual environment (VE) with unconventional spatial characteristics offers to be an interesting case. VE’s can help in detaching one self from the real-world as regards the sense of time, matter and physical constraints, thus enabling a designer to embody and expand into a new palette of inventory.The authors thus hypothesize from a cognitive point of view that extensiveness extensiveness of experience gained by surfing in unconventional virtual environments can positively be related to both creative performance (enhance interactivity, lateral thinking, idea generation and creativity-supporting cognitive processes (retrieval of unconventional knowledge, recruitment of ideas from unconfined virtual environment for creative idea expansion). The authors also believe that creating a new perception of spatial environment as the first step of architecture pedagogy can be of vital impetus in expanding the educator’s ideas. As a practical suggestion the authors suggest conducting praxis based workshops besides the main academic curriculum in which designers can design, surf, play, manipulate unconventional virtual environment, totally free of any constrains in an immersive, interactive virtual environment

Virtual Environments-Architecture Pedagogy-Creativity