This project is a strategic interactive system design, which helps design students to break through creative blocks they come across in their creative process by helping them to reach higher levels of creativity. The system provides design students with a set of personalized tips and tools based on their learner type and the practices derived from both western and eastern traditions with neuroscientific evidence. Thus, this system enables students to express their embedded ideas in the most efficient way.

The Challange

Majority of design students face difficulties in expressing their own Creative ideas due to creative blocks they encounter in the design process. Therefore, this project focused on finding a solution to enable young designers to express their ideas the optimum way by breaking through creative blocks.

Users: Design undergraduates; Who struggle with the inability to express and communicate their design ideas clearly and effectively.

Scope : Comprehensive design project for Bachelor of design
Duration: 4 months
In this project I focused on System Design, UX design/ Research, UI Design, Branding and Smart space concept generation.

When referring to literature, I figured out that a student might encounter four different types of creative blocks during their design process. Namely, they are: Perceptual Block, Emotional Block, Environmental Block, and Intellectual Block. Furthermore, I understood that when a student moves up on the creativity levels the number of creative blocks encountered by them would be less.

Inspiration

Various techniques are defined in both eastern and western practices and I was inspired by the fact of utilization of “Chakras” and universal energies in eastern phillosohies which gives a detailed description of the methods that could be incorperated in one’s daily practices. It is said that in return it enables the person to reach higher levels of creativity as it develops self-awareness.
With this understanding I focused on finding a way that enables design students to break through creative blocks and guide these students to reach higher levels of creativity by developing self-awareness.

The Design Process

After several attempts of different design methods, I figured out that the design process for this project cannot be sequential. Therefore, I came up with a spiral process merging both action research cycle and sequential seven stages of design thinking.

Personas

Abstract idea of the interactive system

Testing the intervention - Workshops

Paper Prototyping _ stage 1

Paper Prototyping _ stage 2

Results

Branding

Limitations of the Project

Due to time constraints and lack of competency in physical space design fabrication and further development was done with advice from an architect.

Creative block identification was limited to classroom and academic process scenarios; thus, environmental block due to external causes were disregarded.

The validity of the suggested strategic approach was verified using user reflective diaries. / Brain state analysis was conducted within technical limitations.

Application was developed only in English language