Design Problem Framing and Creative Sketching in Architectural Education: A Study Among Architecture Students

Architectural design problems vary significantly in their degree of definition, and this variation may influence the creative outcomes of student work. This study provides an empirically validated comparison of creativity scores across well-defined and ill-defined architectural design problems, employing a five-criterion framework (elaboration, imagination, flexibility, fluency, and originality) and a double-blind expert jury protocol. By moving beyond theoretical claims, the study offers quantitative evidence on how problem structure shapes creative performance in architectural education. Architecture students were asked to produce solution sketches for both well-defined and ill-defined problems. The creativity of the resulting products was evaluated by an independent jury of domain-expert academics using five criteria established in the literature: elaboration, imagination, flexibility, fluency, and originality. Evaluation scores were subsequently analyzed with statistical methods to determine which problem type elicited higher creativity. In a sample of 20 second-year architecture students, solutions produced for ill-defined problems received statistically significantly higher total creativity scores than those for well-defined problems (p = 0.022, r = 0.51), suggesting that the structural openness of ill-defined problems may be associated with enhanced divergent thinking and original idea generation, though causal mechanisms remain to be established through future process-level research. These results support integrating ill-defined problems and uncertainty-based design scenarios into architectural education studios more frequently to develop creative problem-solving skills.