Relationships of Creative Personality Traits and Spatial Abilities to Shaping Creativity and Floriculture Material Shaping Skills

In floriculture design, shaping is the use of floral materials as media for expressing ideas. Common floriculture techniques include tying, pasting, winding, connecting, overlapping, and weaving. Shaping is also a key factor in the appeal of the final product. Therefore, this study recruited 149 university students to explore how their floriculture material-shaping skills are affected by factors such as creative personality traits, spatial abilities, and shaping creativity. Students were allowed to use three different leaf materials in their floriculture works: planar leaf, linear leaf, and amorphous leaf materials. Representative planar, linear, and amorphous floriculture materials used in the current study were yellow palm (Chrysalidocarpus lutescens), veitch's screw pine (Pandanus baptistii), and tree fern (Asparagus virgatus), respectively. The average score for creativity in shaping floriculture material was (+/- sD) 3.26 +/- 0.84 (range, 1.33-4.67). Comparisons of the three leaf materials showed that the score for shaping creativity was highest for the planar leaf material (3.70 +/- 1.23), followed by the amorphous leaf material (3.18 +/- 0.99) and the linear leaf material (2.91 +/- 0.94). The chi-square test results indicated that creative personality traits affected the number of shaping skills used, and that spatial abilities and floriculture material-shaping creativity further enhanced skills in floriculture material-shaping. Suggestions for floriculture educators and practitioners are provided accordingly.