Cognitive Characteristics and Design Creativity: An Experimental Study

The objective of this research is to identify the relations between various cognitive characteristics and design creativity so that such relations could be exploited as a guide for design education. In this paper, an experimental study toward these goals is presented where various cognitive characteristics and abilities were evaluated for three groups of students whose exposure and education in design varies. Based on the experiment, constructive perception ability that combines perception and conception and basic ability in visual reasoning composed of visual analysis, synthesis and representation in iterative nature are equally related with creative design ability. However, the correlation between constructive perception and visual reasoning has not been identified in spite of some common aspects of the two.