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Premise

We’re passionate about creative design. But what does this creative design mean, and how can we assess it?

Over the past few years we have completed a number of pavilion projects: designed by students, with varying constraints such as time, budget, number of student participants, and number of professional helpers. It would be informative if we knew which constraints spurred on creativity and which hindered it for future projects. So we set about asking people to rank the completed pavilions in terms of novelty, usefulness and overall creativity.

The online questionnaire is still accepting responses here

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Results

A significant* correlation was found between the mean creativity values and the student:staff ratio at the design workshops. More staff to student numbers equalled a more creative design. We’re hoping to continue this method of assessment with our future projects and expand our project data-set.

The results were presented at the IASS 2018 conference at MIT this July, and lo and behold here is the paper for your reviewing pleasure. Be still your statistical creative beating hearts.

*significant was deemed having a Pearson’s correlation factor of 0.9 or above. This was tricky considering the pavilion sample size of 4…

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Post Script

Since writing the paper, I also came across IDEO’s language of creativty: beauty, brains, bravey, destiny, heart, magic and mastery.  It reminds me of Allan McRobie’s manifesto on how we’re using the wrong language to describe the world around us in terms of straight lines instead of the natural curve.  Maybe there is a new vocabulary around the corner, how fun would that be to assess engineering exams for their heart and magic?