Impact of demographic characteristics on architecture students’ creativity

Abstract

Architecture is a multidisciplinary, multiskilled, multidimensional, and multimedia practice. Designers need to know about many crafts, technologies, and theories and to have the ability to communicate with specialists in many fields. This is also true in the education process for the discipline. Architectural education is not simply vocational education achieved by training. The multifaceted structure of the architectural field leads to the development of a wide spectrum of courses in the architectural curriculum. The distribution and classification of architectural courses in the curriculum, states that the courses in the curriculum of contemporary architectural education institutions can be classified into four categories. In the first category, some courses develop an architectural orientation; second, some courses provide the scientific foundation of architecture; the third category consists of the courses that strengthen the base of architectural design, and expression; and finally, there are the design studio courses that synthesize the concepts of the previous three categories. The design studio is the core of all architecture courses and the most dominant in architectural education. Every design is a problem at the beginning of the design process. Creativity is a fundamental aspect in design problem-solving since the development of new design solutions demands to put into practice creative skills. Creative thinking enables the frame of a problem from unconventional viewpoints. It allows gifted designers to go beyond predictable solutions, and explore innovative ideas. This study focuses on the demographic characteristics of architecture students that impact their creativity. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to determine the effects of differences of demographic variables on creativity and offering solutions. To reach this aim a questionnaire was constituted by researchers and sent to architecture students at Hasan Kalyoncu University during 2020-2021 fall semester via e-mail. The Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale (K-DOCS) was employed in the current study to measure participants’ creativity. Obtained data were analysed statistically using SPSS 22.0 software.