New perception of virtual environments, Enhancement of creativity Increasing dimension of design starting point

Abstract

The digital era allows for a new domain of architectural experience. Within a virtual environment designs can be created that go beyond the mere accommodation of literal functions, and that affect and contribute to the human experience by dynamically interacting with and affecting the inhabitants’ life. A key point in “creativity”, considering different disciplines, is the role of previously gained experiences, which cause the emerging of intuition. Accentuating the role of new experiences in enhancing the intuition, by designing in an imaginary world, stands to be an interesting move. Detached from the real one in sense of time and matter, the imaginary world enables the designer to cross the borderline of reality. The hypothesis underlying this ongoing research, from a cognitive point of view, is that the extensiveness of experiences gained by exploring unconventional virtual environments relates positively to both creative performance (enhancing interactivity, lateral thinking, idea generation, etc) and creativity-supporting cognitive processes (retrieval of unconventional knowledge, recruitment of ideas from unconfined virtual environments for creative idea expansion). Practically, the authors propose starting the design from a point cloud in a virtual environment that can be manipulated by the designer immersing in this environment.