Creative thinking education model for concept development stage in spatial design

The 21st century has seen radical transformations in social, cultural, environmental, socio-political and socio-economic areas brought on by accelerating digital and technological improvements. These developments have ushered in a period dominated by digitalized and computational approaches that have proved effective in overcoming geometric boundaries and creating a virtual space that has multiple potentials. The parametric and related design methods which are currently in use, have been criticized for their failure to communicate in socio-cultural meaning, as they do not provide user, environment or context dimensions. In this context, this thesis, while accepting the inevitable changes in design theories and methods, proposes a studio-training model that aims to eliminate the lack of meaning, the negative side-effect of digital design approach, by employing creative-thinking education at the concept development stage. The study, designed as a pre -post-test, proceeds through the General Information Form, Metacognitive Awareness Inventory, Problem Solving Inventory, Kolb Learning Styles Inventory and Torrance Creative Thinking A- B Tests verbal section. The study concludes that the proposed education model has a statistically positive effect on creativity for most of the subjects. On the other hand, though the results for this particular group are not statistically significant, the students who had a converging learning style achieved higher scores in their education using creative thinking as opposed to other styles. The students who had low problem-solving scores demonstrated a high tendency to think creatively. As all of the students were above average in metacognitive awareness, no correlation was found with creativity. It is hoped that this study will constitute a firm basis for providing satisfactory answers to the charge of contextlessness / meaninglessness levelled at digital design. Future studies might want to take into consideration the usefullness of a student monitoring / measurement study for the Concept Development Training Model and the effectiveness of evaluating students on this scale.