Ricerc@Sapienza

The field of knowledge defined by the terms "creativity" and "reality" may be considered the permanent framework for a reflection on innovation and the transformation of architecture and cities.

Creativity is a learning objective explicitly required by the Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning and school national documents. According to this point of view, this essay an operative strategy aimed at improving creativity at school.

The chapter aims to study the creative process and innovation in a common path, and the concept of creativity through the knowledge re-combining. This aspect is strongly connected with the role of lateral thinking in this process. Here we show a case of an Italian virtuous food company that considers these aspects, i.e. innovation and knowledge recombining, of high relevance in the industry management. The case study here examined is an interesting example of lateral thinking, hence of creativity.

Dance represents an opportunity to promote not only motor skills but also other cognitive functions and general well-being. In this study, 58 children aged 6-10 years were enrolled in order to test the issue if dance improves divergent thinking in motor and visual domains (domain-general and domain-specificity hypotheses), and whether the topological map of the body mediates their performance at the motor task (mediation hypothesis). Therefore, 33 children practicing dance were compared with a control group (25 children).

Musical expertise has positive effects on cognition, especially on verbal and linguistic processing. In this study
the relationships between musical expertise, not involving improvisation training, and divergent thinking were
explored. Expert and self-taught musicians were tested in musical, verbal and visual divergent thinking, and
were compared with a group of non-musicians in verbal and visual divergent thinking. The musical task required
to generate many different pieces of music using the incipit of ‘Happy Birthday’ as a starting point; the verbal

According to the peak and decline model diver- gent thinking declines at a specific age (in or after middle age). However, if divergent thinking declines steadily in aging still has to be clarified. In order to explore the age- related changes in verbal and visual divergent thinking, in the present study a sample of 159 participants was divided in five age groups: young adults (18–35 years), middle- aged adults (36–55), young old (56–74), old (75–85) and the oldest-old (86–98).

Creativity, understood as a process of creation through the use of imagination and original ideas, has always been the engine of architecture in both formal and informal communities. Based on contextual observations and people’s needs, this creativity is often fueled and challenged to produce innovative architectural and urban solutions.