Symbiotic visual creativity in higher education: Escape-room pedagogy across analogue, digital, and AI-mediated practice

Visual creativity is increasingly recognised as a foundational competency in higher education, particularly within disciplines grounded in digital interaction, interface design, and multimodal communication. Yet foundational perceptual frameworks such as Gestalt principles are frequently taught through abstract explanation rather than experiential engagement. This practice-based study presents the design, implementation, and reflective analysis of an immersive escape-room intervention developed to teach Gestalt principles through Design Thinking and Game Design integration. Implemented in undergraduate Human–Computer Interaction and User Experience college courses, the project positioned students as designers of perceptual puzzles rather than passive recipients of theory. Students collaboratively constructed narrative-driven escape-room clues embodying Similarity, Proximity, Closure, Continuity, and Figure–Ground. Prototypes were developed using analogue ideation, digital tools, and generative AI-assisted visualisation, followed by structured peer testing and iterative refinement. Findings suggest that experiential puzzle construction fosters deeper conceptual understanding, strengthens visual literacy, and models a symbiotic pedagogy in which human creativity and AI mediation coexist productively. The study contributes to emerging conversations about visual creativity, game-based learning, and education futures.