The Relationship Between Contextual Cues in Virtual Environments and Creative Processes

Because of the range of design possibilities they provide, virtual environments have a promising potential to support creative work. This article presents an experiment that explores the effects of contextual cues, provided in a virtual environment, on performance in a creative task. One hundred thirty-five participants completed a classical creativity task in one of three environments: a virtual creativity-conducive environment (CCE), comprising standardized elements identified from a survey as being characteristic of environments that support creativity, a real meeting room (real control environment), and its virtual replication (virtual control environment). Results show that participants produced more original ideas and explored idea categories in greater depth in the CCE than in the control conditions. These results were discussed in terms of research on creativity, priming, virtual environments, and of the design of workplaces.