Implementing Unconventional Virtual Environments for Enhancing Creativity in Architecture Pedagogy

What can be extracted as a common definition amongst near 100 different definitions of creativity according to different disciplines is: Creativity is a new combination of what you have in your inventory of experiences + intuition. It can be considered that expanding the inventory of experiences can gradually help in novel combination of experiences and intuition. To support and promote such an expansion, experiencing a virtual environment VE with unconventional spatial characteristics offers to be an interesting case. VE's can help in detaching one self from the real-world as regards the sense of time, matter and physical constraints, thus enabling a designer to embody and expand into a new palette of inventory.The authors thus hypothesize from a cognitive point of view that extensivenessi¾ extensiveness ofi¾ experience gained by surfing in unconventional virtual environments can positively be related to both creativei¾ performance enhance interactivity, lateral thinking, idea generation and creativity-supporting cognitivei¾ processes retrieval of unconventional knowledge, recruitment of ideas from unconfined virtual environment fori¾ creative idea expansion. The authors also believe that creating a new perception of spatial environment as the first stepi¾ of architecture pedagogy can be of vital impetus in expanding the educator's ideas. As a practical suggestion the authors suggest conductingi¾ praxis based workshops besides the main academic curriculum in which designers can design, surf, play, manipulate unconventionali¾ virtual environment, totally free of any constrains in an immersive, interactive virtual environment.