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

Over the past few years we have completed a number of pavilions, designed by students, with varying constraints such as time, budget, number of student participants, and number of professional helpers. It would be very informative if we knew which constraints spurred on creativity and which hindered it for future projects. So we set about asking as many people as we could muster, to rank our completed pavilions in terms of novelty, usefulness and overall creativity. I’ll leave the definition of those to your reading of our resulting paper – some incentive eh?

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 dataset (admittedly currently small).

Dan will be presenting the resulting paper at the IASS conference in Boston in July (16th to 20th) so if you happen to be passing through, be sure to say hi! Watch out for our news space for the conference update, and we’ll get the paper on here too for your reading pleasure after the conference. Be still your statisical creative beating hearts.

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?