Sustaining Creatively? Investigating the Effects of Creativity and Sustainability-Focused Evaluation Criteria in Design Tasks

Abstract As the need for environmentally sustainable solutions grows, there has emerged an ongoing effort to integrate considerations for the environment throughout the engineering design process. Towards these efforts, several researchers have employed creativity-invoking methods such as alternate uses tasks to encourage the generation of environmentally sustainable solutions. Moreover, these efforts span the design process, ranging from concept generation to concept selection and evaluation. Prior research suggests that external evaluations play an important role in regulating designers’ motivation, and consequently, the outcomes of their design and creative processes. However, little research has investigated how the evaluation criteria used in sustainable design tasks influence designers’ performance. Our aim in this research is to investigate this research gap through an experimental study with novice designers. Specifically, we compared the solutions generated by designers when given a design problem with either creativity-focused evaluation or sustainability-focused evaluation. From the results of our experiment, we see that the evaluation criteria used in the design problem did not impact either the creativity or the environmental sustainability of the participants’ solutions. This finding calls for a deeper investigation into the role of creativity in the generation of environmentally sustainable solutions. This finding also calls for a further study of the potentially conflicting tradeoffs involved in the design of environmentally sustainable solutions.