Impact on creative thinking by an intrinsic calm approach of interior architecture students / Dahlia Mohd Shariff

Creativity, generation of ideas and artistic ability for visual communication are highly essential to an interior architect. Interior Architecture/Design educators and creativity theorists differ in their perspectives towards the activity of generating ideas, how ideas arise in the mind, the "Eureka" or "Ah-ha" experience, the point of illumination. To the creativity practitioners, calmness helps to improve creativity, to the Interior Architecture/Design educators this is not so. The education and training of the interior architects are still very orthodox and places high emphasis of achievement and performance through stressful measures of overload of work and time datelines.This research studied the effects of being calm onto the creative thinking and artistic performance, intrinsically, within a person, and not from the external. The first insight, incubation and illumination stages of the creative process are very intuitive and not easily explained unlike the preparation and verification stages. The value of this research would be to investigate the effect of the intrinsic calm approach which could be attained within the individual's self and can be called upon at will, internally, instantly and be very useful to any individual requiring creative thinking. The recommended Brain Gym exercises, were verified by a medical doctor, was the treatment applied to achieve the clam mind state of the participants. The Department of Interior Architecture, UiTM was chosen as it was the pioneer and the oldest education institute offering Interior Design and Interior Architecture since 1975. This department was responsible for the formation of the Malaysian Institute of Interior Designers. It has to date the highest number of academically qualified teaching staff and highest number of achievers. Its accomplishment is evident in the large number of graduates, approximately 3500 (2009). This research was carried out in three parts. Part A was an experiment involving 57 participants with Control Group (no treatment) and Experimental Group (with treatment) carried out UiTM Shah Alam using six art tests by art educators and creativity theorists. This directly observed actual, intuitive and spontaneous visual responses objectively and showed the creative performance at the intuitive stage of the creative process. Objectivity was ensured by addressing sensitivities in creativity experiments; using categorical assessment of artistic elements; and sincere self-evaluations by the participants themselves. Part B examined the academic success and performance of the groups by comparing examination results often subjects and interviews with the lecturers concerned. Part C surveyed 313 respondents as to their experience and conditions at the illumination stage.