Creativity in design: A cross-disciplinary approach

The issue of creativity in design was studied within two very diverse disciplines at the University of Kentucky. These disciplines were: Civil Engineering and Interior Design. These two disciplines were selected for their vastly different styles of creativity in practice and pedagogy. The study had two phases. The first phase was to assess the creativity of the freshman class in both disciplines. The second phase was to expose a subset of the students to a series of creativity training modules and assess any shift in their creative abilities. To accomplish this, a statistically valid experiment was designed using "control" and "treatment" groups within each discipline. The data demonstrated improvements in some categories of creativity. This improvement in the creativity index was possible as a result of a special creativity-training module. Future work will include larger pool, and longitudinal creativity studies.