Spatial imagination in design

The result of a one-year project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council's (AHRC) joint initiative 'Designing for the 21st Century', the cluster is an international group of academics and design professionals from 11 disciplines, spanning creative arts, computer science, architecture and psychology.

The cluster participants were brought together to discuss and develop imaginative design processes, and focused on cross-sector and cross-disciplinary research and collaboration. Principal Investigator Dr Jane Rendell (UCL Bartlett School) said: "The cluster's activities were focused around five workshops which examined the relationship between imagination and the design processes of writing, drawing and modelling. The thematic areas explored in the research cluster 'understood creativity' through theories of imagination and reveal how imaginative processes are 'applied in design practice'."

The group focused on the role of spatial imagination as a creative driver of design, and its operation in architecture and spatial design processes. In particular, the cluster investigated the scope of the spatial imagination in the processes of writing, modelling and drawing to consider a number of research problems - how to identify with new theories and methods of spatial imagination in design processes, how spatial imagination acts as a design tool, the role of spatial imagination as a mechanism of critical interpretation and evaluation of the designed environment, and how the spatial imagination constructs the user's experience of design in the built environment.

The 'Spatial Imagination' exhibition is at the Domobaal Gallery in Bloomsbury until 20 January 2006.

• Links:
• Spatial Imagination
• Domobaal Gallery
• Designing for the 21st Century
• UCL Bartlett School of Architecture