THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SENSORY AWARENESS AND CREATIVITY IN DESIGN EDUCATION

It is an indisputable fact that the concept of creativity occupies an important place in the field of design education. In this context, different approaches are tried out in design studios, which are also design education centres, with the aim of finding and developing creative ideas. Some of the methods that are used for the development of creative ideas in design education are accompanied by the strategies aiming to create sensory awareness. These new quests which primarily aim at developing creativity focus on critical and associational thinking with the utilization of cognitive and affective strategies. The methods which support sensory process are used in order to develop creative thinking. With the awareness of sensory process and its contributions on the concept of creativity, designer candidates will become individuals, who better assimilate their senses and accordingly their environment with different and original perspectives. This study discusses the impact of the sensory awareness on creativity. The sensory awareness comes into being by multi-sensory awareness studios, which enables the vision to integrate with the other senses. This study entails the analyses of the studies related to the 3D visualization of the concept in order to determine the differences in the students' way of thinking and creativity levels, which were raised by the multi-sensory awareness studios. This research was done in order to determine the contributions of the sensory awareness to creative thinking. 60 freshmen from the Department of Interior Architecture at Karadeniz Technical University during the academic year of 2014-2015 participated in this research. In the first week of the education, Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (Form-A) was applied to all of the students in order to define their creativity levels. Then, the students were asked to select one of the ten concepts and to create 3D representations of the selected concept. During the processes of concept selection and illustration, the answers of the students about which sense(s) was used actively, and which sense(s) directed them during the process were determined. During studio hours, thirty students randomly chosen from the total group of sixty students attended the sensory awareness education that is specific to "Multi-Sensory Awareness Studios" which was based on the verbal and formal creativity parameters of Torrance Test of Creative Thinking. These studios were created with the intention of developing the process of awareness towards the senses. They were also formed as it was contended that vision along with the other senses should be taught together in design education. After the studies were applied, 3D representations were developed with the same concepts, which were chosen by the students in the first step of the education, in order to define how the education affected the students' way of thinking and creativity levels. In this way, sensory features, their treatment of strong concepts, and their perspectives of the design were evaluated, and thus to what extent and which sense organs they used in their designs in the processes of selecting the concepts and visualizing them in 3D form were determined. Finally, Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (Form-B) was applied to all of the students in order to quantitatively determine the impact of the multisensory awareness education on their state of creativity. As a result of the statistical analyses, it was determined that the multisensory awareness education proposal, which were applied in order to increase the sense awareness and draw attention to their relation between the senses and the design, increased both the total and the figurative creativity of the students. It is considered that this study offers a new perspective towards the design education, since the sensory process has a multi-sensory dimension and the senses are internalized and then contribute to the creative thinking process positively.