WHAT DOES THE ARCHITECTURAL CREATIVE LEAP LOOK LIKE THROUGH A CONCEPTUAL DESIGN PHASE IN THE UNDERGRADUATE ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN STUDIO?

Thesis (Ph.D.), Design, Washington State UniversityThe creative leap is a mental creative moment in which one discovers and illustrates a new design idea, or restructures and develops an old one. It gives birth to the design continuity and adds fluidity to the design concept. There are different views about the creative leap and its holistic view remains unresolved and undiscovered. This research was conducted to answer these related questions: what does the creative leap look like through a conceptual design phase?; what are the factors that might facilitate the creative leap?; and what are the relationships/interrelationships between these factors? The protocol analysis of 10 design experiments was used mainly to collect two types of data. The first was visual or graphical data (drawing and writing), which was scored by six professional architectural design instructors with respect to the divergent thinking factors. The verbal data (talking) was transcribed, analyzed, segmented, and coded by using a Limited Commitment Mode (LCM) control strategy to elicit the qualitative and quantitative value for the rest of the factors. The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (Pearson r) was computed to assess the degree of association between all the factors. The results from this study show that the creative leap is a sudden mental insight that comes as a result of structuring the design knowledge cycle. It arises several times to create a new design idea or develop an existing one toward a final solution. Further, the total content of creative leaps comprise the final contents of the design concept. The creative leap no longer relies on talent or chance alone; it can be taught, learned, and developed by education to enhance design thinking. Moreover, an increase in creative leaps is associated with increases in each of the following factors: the architectural design education level, divergent thinking variables, the total number of sub-design modules, the total number of design decisions, creativity indicators, lateral thinking approaches, structuring of design knowledge cycle, the level of expertise, design proficiency, and the level of design cognition. Additionally, there is no relationship between the creative leap and each of the following factors: age, gender, and verbal fluency rate.Department of Design, Washington State Universit