The multisensory creative experience: new creative workshops co-created by Repères, Lyfe Institute, and Creative Emulsion.

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Immerse yourself in the multi-sensory creative experience for a prosperous future for businesses!

In the hustle and bustle of the 21st century, creativity appears as an essential and indispensable lever to help businesses navigate through constant challenges.

Creativity is often perceived as a purely cognitive process, but it is actually a multimodal process resulting from the integration of brain networks and sensory modalities. Sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste—the true architects of consumers' emotional, hedonic, and behavioral responses—impact creative thinking.

Scientific studies 1,2,3 have thus revealed that sensory modalities act in a specific way on creative processes such as divergent thinking (i.e. the association of ideas) or convergent thinking (in other words the creation of a new idea from the combination and selection of different stimuli).

Boost creativity by playing on the senses in an immersive, multisensory space

The teams from the company Repères , the research and innovation center of the Lyfe Institute (formerly the Paul Bocuse Institute), and the Émulsion Créative agency are joining forces to offer companies access to creative approaches enriched by the stimulation of the senses.

Using The Lab in the Bag technologies, they offer creative workshops in an immersive, multisensory environment, with the activation of sensory modalities relevant to the different stages of the creative process.

Case study: Tasty legumes for young people

A study demonstrating the role of the senses in a creativity workshop was presented at the recent PANGBORN Sensory Congress, held in Nantes this summer. You can download the poster here .

The instruction was to create legume-based recipes that would be irresistible to young French people.

These workshops took place in collaboration with students and chefs from the Lyfe Institute.

Three workshops were conducted under standard conditions ( Figure 1 and Figure 3 ), without using the immersive room's features. Three other workshops were "augmented" with 360° projected sound and visual effects ( Figure 2 and Figure 4 ), chosen based on scientific publications describing their effects on cognitive processes.

Figure 1 Divergence phase in a standard workshop

Ideas amplified by multisensory immersion

The final recipe proposals were evaluated by chefs, who highlighted the superior performance of the immersive multisensory approach, with more original and detailed ideas, significantly surpassing those generated in a standard environment.

Figure 2 Divergence phase in a multisensory immersive workshop

More engaged and creative participants

Analysis of participant behavior notably highlighted a higher level of engagement in immersion situations:

Figure 3 Convergence phase in a standard workshop

During the divergence ( brainstorming ) phase, the immersive groups ( Figure 2 ) continued to produce new ideas throughout the time allotted to the task, while the standard groups ( Figure 1 ) exhausted all their ideas before the end of the exercise.

During the convergence phase (in other words, the creation of a new idea from two stimuli), participants were more focused ( Figure 4 ) and less likely to get distracted or digress into other topics.

Figure 4 Convergence phase in a multisensory immersive workshop

Conclusion: an immersive and multisensory creative future

Immersive multisensory technologies, combined with the expertise of creativity specialists, open up new perspectives for innovation approaches.

Contact the experts at Repères, Institut Lyfe and Émulsion créative to learn more and immerse yourself in multisensory creativity :

>font size=-3 1 Bourgeois-Bougrine, S., Bonnardel, N., Burkhardt, JM, Thornhill-Miller, B., Pahlavan, F., Buisine, S., Guegan, J., Pichot, N., & Lubart, T. (2022). Immersive Virtual Environments' Impact on Individual and Collective Creativity A Review of Recent Research. European Psychologist, 27(3), 237–253. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000481

2 Wang, QJ, Escobar, FB, Mathiesen, SL, & Mota, PA Da. (2021). Can eating make us more creative? A multisensory perspective. Foods, 10(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods10020469

3 Xia, T., Sun, Y., An, Y., & Li, L. (2023). The influence of music environment on conceptual design creativity. Frontiers in Psychology, 14(February), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1052257

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