As an environmental designer, it is ever important to lift your work to the next level. This means that you never settle into a design process plateau where creative growth remains stagnant. And as you work to inject multi-sensory design into your architectural creations, you keep your design vision, decision-making, and communication skills at their peak levels. This is why I created the following top 5 list of best ways to grow your design creativity in the year ahead…

• Practice Creative Thinking Daily: Journal about your design projects by not only sketching, but also by writing about how to make them better. Great ideas are born while writing.

• Schedule Brainstorming Sessions: Plan time within your design process to think of many possible solutions to a design challenge. Then, you can choose the best solution, or combine great ideas from various solutions into a super-solution.

• Switch Design Tools: Use a different design tool to help you think differently about a design challenge and its solution. For example, if you use computers to create 3D still visualizations, then try creating a 3D animation of your design – or use a different kind of modeling software to generate the geometric forms.

• Conduct a Portfolio Review: Analyze your previous projects within your portfolio with a strategic eye. Ask yourself: How can I make my next project even better? What has been missing from my previous designs that if I included in my next design, would bring my work to a heightened, greater, level?

• Determine Your WHY: Spend some time figuring out why you do the work you do. By getting a deeper understanding into your purpose, you will unlock a more creative purpose for your design work that will resonate with clients and future building occupants.

Really, creativity is a practice that you must engage in to strengthen your design skills. While working on design projects, you pull from your creative skillset – but you also must grow creativity as you progress and advance as a designer over the longer term. Creativity is an important part of multi-sensory design, and is one that must be developed if one is to formulate extraordinary design concepts.

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