Are creative ideas also environmentally sustainable? Investigating the correlations between the creativity and environmental sustainability of student designers' ideas

Abstract With the world’s natural resources being depleted at accelerating rates, the need for environmentally sustainable engineering solutions has become direr than ever. Several researchers have proposed creativity as a pathway for realizing effective solutions to issues related to environmental sustainability; however, little research has investigated whether creative ideas are also environmentally sustainable. Specifically, we are unsure of how the components of creativity—i.e., uniqueness and usefulness—relate to the environmental sustainability of engineering design solutions. We aim to explore this research gap through a correlational study with student designers comprising a sustainable design educational lecture and a design task. Participants were either introduced to the educational intervention before or after the design tasks (i.e., the treatment and comparison groups, respectively). The designs generated by the participants were evaluated for their creativity (i.e., uniqueness and usefulness) and their environmental sustainability (i.e., material reuse, maximizing utility & accessibility, and corrective measures for use), and the correlations between the assessments were tested separately for the treatment and comparison groups. From our results, we see that designs that maximized utility & accessibility—a component of environmental sustainability assessment—were highly useful, and this relationship was observed in both the treatment and comparison groups. We also see that designs that maximized material reuse—another component of environmental sustainability assessment—scored higher on uniqueness, and this relationship was only observed in the treatment group. Our results suggest that some components of environmental sustainability are more likely to correlate with components of creativity and these correlations may depend on factors such as their overlap with the design problem under consideration.