Embodied dynamics of creative placemaking: conceptualizing the spaces, places, and environments of creativity.

Summary

This conceptual analysis argues that creativity must be understood as a physically and socially situated practice, drawing on embodied creativity, ecological psychology, and 4E cognitive science. It synthesizes literature from creativity, environmental design, ecological psychology, and cognitive science to clarify how physical environments relate to creative processes. The work aims to bridge the gap between anecdotal evidence and fragmented empirical insights by proposing a framework linking designed environments to creativity, addressing how creative people leverage settings for productivity and insight.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Researchers have long called for an integrated approach toward understanding the complex relationships between factors influencing creativity. Significant efforts have been made in this area through research examining interactions between personal traits, social environments, and creative productivity. However, relationships among factors involving the physical context of creativity have less often been the focus of cross-disciplinary inquiry, due, in part, to lack of any conceptual framework connecting them. This leaves interior designers, architects, and facility planners left to rely largely on anecdotal evidence and fragmented empirical insights to inform creative placemaking efforts through their environmental designs. Recent embodied creativity approaches have argued that to advance creative process knowledge and facilitate creativity in educational and work environments, creativity must be considered a physically and socially situated practice. There is empirical evidence that professionally and historically creative people are aware that the physical environment is an important factor in their creative productivity, that they leverage and manipulate features and qualities of a setting during creative efforts, and attribute insights and productivity to specific settings. Yet there is no framework linking the physical environment and creative processes, suggesting a lack of awareness about how designed environments might be a resource for creativity. This conceptual analysis aims to bridge this gap by utilizing an embodied creativity lens, grounded in ecological psychology and 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) cognitive science, to evaluate and synthesize literature from creativity, environmental design, ecological psychology, and cognitive science towards clarifying person-environment relationships during creativity, including conceptualizations of creative space, place, and physical environments supporting creativity.

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