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

Despite long-standing calls for an integrated understanding of creativity, the role of the physical environment remains poorly connected to other factors. Creatively productive people report that they deliberately use and modify their surroundings to enhance creative work, yet no conceptual framework links designed spaces to creative processes. This conceptual analysis applies an embodied creativity lens grounded in ecological psychology and 4E cognitive science to synthesize literature from creativity, environmental design, and related fields. It aims to clarify person-environment relationships during creativity, including how creative space, place, and physical settings can support creative work, addressing a gap that leaves designers relying on anecdotal evidence.

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.