Can creative evaluation encourage sustainable design? Investigating the effects of creativity and sustainability-focused design goals on engineering design outcomes

As the need for sustainable designs grows, there are ongoing efforts to integrate environmental considerations into engineering design. Creative stimuli could encourage sustainable ideas in concept generation, evaluation, and selection. External evaluations regulate designers' motivation, and consequently, the outcomes of their creative processes. However, little research has investigated the effects of the design goals on the creativity and sustainability of designers' ideas. We investigated this research gap through an experimental study with novice designers. We compared the ideas generated by designers when given a design problem with either a creativity- or sustainability-focused design goal. Our results indicate that the design goal neither influenced the creativity nor the environmental sustainability of the designers' ideas. However, ideas generated by designers who received the sustainability-focused design goal showed more positive and significant correlations between creativity and sustainability. The temporal precedence of providing the design goal before idea generation provides evidence that sustainability-focused design goals could encourage the better-integrated application of creativity and sustainability in idea generation. Moreover, while creative stimuli would encourage sustainable design, a focus on creativity may overshadow the emphasis on sustainability in the design process. Therefore, designers and design educators must be careful not to over-emphasize creativity in sustainable design.