Creativity-supporting environments: An emotion-based framework for influencing designers’ creativity through using design environments
Organisations need to develop their physical/psychological environments in order to build more creative, positive, activated and motivated spaces for people to work. Although previous research has investigated the effect of environment on creative performance, there has been little research into how it might support creative work that evolves through a sequence of divergent and convergent activities based on people’s emotions. This research proposes a theoretical framework with which to design the environments to support creative thinking that recognize and apply components that link creativity and emotions. Environment, emotion and creativity are the 3 main elements that form the structure of this framework. It is called the CSE (Creativity-Support-Environment) framework. The framework uses the link between emotion and creativity to create physical and digital environments that actively enhance and maintain different types of creative thinking in the design workspace. The framework addresses that gap in knowledge in the fields of environmental design and psychology, the effect of physical and digital work environment on creativity on the one hand, and the impact of emotions on creativity in the environment. On the other, the framework gives rise to guidelines for designing physical and digital spaces that facilitate creative thinking. To validate the CSE framework, empirical studies were undertaken in different environments, a set of design guidelines that can be applied in designing spaces with different stimuli (physical and digital), to foster divergent and convergent creative thinking. The CSE framework is important because it examines creativity from the perspective of emotion and applies the link of creativity and emotion in designing the environment to improve creative thoughts. In practice, the design guidelines can be adopted by designers of physical and digital environments to ensure those environments better support divergent and convergent design tasks. The results of this research have implications for the development of further design guidelines to form the construction of creative design environments in organizations with the aim of optimizing creative potential.
HD Industries. Land use. Labor, QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
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