Conventional Exploration of Creative Design in Architectural Education

The digitalization of architectural design is growing rapidly. The world considers that digitalization accelerates, enriches, and makes design more creative and varied. The digitalization process cannot be completely automated. In architectural education, it is necessary to have a tiered knowledge from the manual stage to digitalization. So, the basis of exploring ideas in creative designs was strongly and maturely understood at the digitalization levels. This study aims to provide an overview of whether the exploration of creative design conventionally meets the principles of visual design in architectural education. The method used was action research, with an open-ended question and an assessment of the creative designs by architecture students. The results show that the conventional architectural design has accommodated all the principles of visual design (balance, rhythm, harmony, unity, and focus) except for the concept of proportion by 67% and focus by 27%. Other results show that an efficient way to create creative ideas was to imitate existing designs and develop them according to the architect's fantasy imagination. The fantasizing (supported by a conducive environment) plays a dominant role instead of the experience. Laziness was a factor that inhibited the creative design ideas in the conventional method. A conducive environment during the design process was the most dominant supporting factor.