Ms Mona Bisadi will present his P.H.D thesis on " The Design Principles of Architectural and urban design Research Centers for Increasing Creativity and Innovation "at 8:30 A.M on 14 May 2013 under the guidance of Dr.Farhang Mozaffar and Dr.Hosseini.

  

Abstract

 

Research activities, whose promotion is strongly dependent on the creativity and innovation, have an extremely significant role in the development of societies. The built environment is a key factor in the process of creativity and innovation. This research has focused on the identification of space characteristics that increase the researchers’ creativity and innovation in an “Architecture and Urban Design (AUD) research center”.

The research method of the present dissertation is a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Four steps are taken for the purpose of this research fulfillment. In the first step, the literature is reviewed and the effective factors of creativity and innovation that are mostly affected by built environment are accordingly recognized. These factors include tranquility, motivation, creative thinking, and communication. In the second step, some instants of successful international research-workplaces along with some Iranian and foreign architectural research centers are investigated. Moreover, several semi-structural interviews with architectural researchers are conducted in order to illustrate the desirable spatial characteristics of AUD research centers. In the next step, a questionnaire is designed based on the outputs of the first and second steps. The questionnaire was filled out by faculty members and PhD students of AUD departments. The collected data in this stage are analyzed through the descriptive statistic and RM-ANOVA methods. Finally, at the last step, some design principles of AUD research centers are achieved. For this reason, based on the consequences of the pervious steps, 30 brainstorming sessions around the subjects of private and public spaces of AUD research centers were hold (15 for each subject). In each session, 3 architectures with experiences of designing research and educational places took part. The results of brainstorming were then ranked by some expert professors in the field of creativity as well as educational and research places.

The findings of this dissertation show that closed plan offices are more successful than open plan ones in increasing researchers’ creativity and innovation. Furthermore, the most important spatial characteristics of offices are beauty and privacy. Beauty of offices facilitates researchers’ creativity and innovation by improving their tranquility and comfort. Additionally, having privacy in offices by enhancing creative thinking could be effective for growing the creativity and innovation.

Talking about the public zones, data analysis demonstrate that spatial diversity and transparency are effective spatial characteristics in increasing researchers’ creativity and innovation. The role of these characteristics is as follows: spatial diversity motivates researchers to reside in their workplaces longer and transparency improves their sense of tranquility and the opportunity of communication, as well as, motivates them for longer stays. Besides, the findings show that recreational spaces in research centers could assist researchers' creativity and innovation by increasing their tranquility and physical comfort, motivation, creative thinking, and communication. Ultimately,  the present dissertation demonstrate some specific guidelines to achieve to the mentioned spatial characteristics of private and public spaces of AUD research centers.    

Key words: Creativity and innovation, spatial aspects, offices, research center.