Assessing the long-term impact of a metacognitive approach to creative skill development

The goal of this research was to determine the long-term impact that selected instructional interventions, based on research in metacognition and learning theory, have on students’ creativity. The study builds off research that has been conducted documenting the impact of creative thinking based instructional interventions. The study tracked design students beginning their freshman year to determine if observed improvements have been maintained throughout 4 years of undergraduate study. Preliminary research statistically tested the introduction of structured metacognitive skills on the development of creative thinking ability for a diverse population of undergraduate design students. This research indicated that an approach to education influenced by research in learning theory and metacognition does, in the short-term, result in students who are more creative. By continuing testing throughout students’ education an equally important question was answered. To what degree do students maintain or improve this level of enhanced creative thinking ability over an extended period of time? The findings showed that students who participated in one or both interventions finished with significantly higher levels of creative thinking. The knowledge gained also demonstrated how newly structured educational interventions utilizing online blogs and other Internet based technologies were successful in enhancing and maintaining students’ creative thinking abilities. The goal was to provide educators with insight and guidance in the application of a metacognitive approach and to introduce available technologies to aid in this process. This study provides educators with a plan of action consisting of a toolbox of creative strategies and a framework for a reflective approach.     

A model of creative design process for fostering creativity of students in design education

Creativity, which is concerned with problem solving, is essential if we are to generate new solutions to the massive and complex problems in the unknown future. Our next generation needs an educational platform where they can be taught to possess creativity. Design education is such a way to foster students’ creativity. Therefore, it is essential to understand the creative design process and its routine in order to show how students can generate creative output and how teachers can guide students in the design process. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to investigate the creative design process as it is employed in producing creative designs, and further recommend how students can practise and learn to be creative based on the model process developed in this paper. The model is expected to provide a guideline for teachers to facilitate students along the creative thinking process.     

Implementing an exemplar-based approach in an interaction design subject: enhancing students’ awareness of the need to be creative

In higher education effective teaching includes making learning goals and standards clear to students. In architecture and design education in particular, goals and standards around assessment are often not well articulated. There is good evidence that when teachers engage students before an assessment in marking exemplars, and explain why the exemplars received the grades they did, students’ performance in their written assessment is consequently enhanced. However some teachers are concerned that exemplars may discourage students from being creative; this concern is particularly important in design education. In this small-scale mixed methods study we explore interaction design students’ perceptions of the effect of an exemplar-based teaching approach on their work in a design task. Our quantitative and qualitative results show that students developed their understanding of task criteria and standards; far from discouraging their creativity, most students perceived that their experience of the approach enhanced their awareness of the need to produce an original design. The exemplar-based approach used in this study complements the studio-based teaching approach in design education, and helps to make clear the design goals and standards that teachers expect their students to strive for.     

Student response to an Internet-mediated industrial design studio course

The purpose of this study is to investigate student attitudes towards and perceptions of using the Internet and information technology to mediate a design studio course and to propose guidelines and suggestions for developing Internet-mediated design studio courses. Two classes of third-year undergraduate industrial design students in two collaborating universities in Taiwan—Chang Gung University and National Yunlin University of Science and Technology—participated in an experimental design studio course mediated with an online design learning environment. Surveys and focus group interviews were conducted at the end of the course to record students’ attitudes and perceptions. The students thought that the approach used had a positive influence on design teaching and learning and expressed acceptance of using the Internet to support design education. Finally, suggestions were proposed to help design educators in adopting, modifying, and developing systems for using the Internet to mediate design studio courses.     

Recognizing and fostering creativity in technological design education

The importance of creativity in technological design education is now clearly recognized, both in everyday understanding and also in formal curriculum guidelines. Design offers special opportunities for creativity because of the “openness” of problems (ill-defined problems, the existence of a variety of pathways to the solution, the absence of pre-specified “correct” solutions). However, teachers are still confronted by the question of how to specify which designs are creative and why, how to identify where the creative strengths of designs lie so that students can build on these, and what advice to give on how to change designs to make them more creative. There are also still open questions concerning design pedagogy. A “functional” model of creativity offers guidelines for making plain to students what they are expected to achieve with their designs and for diagnosing the creativity of the designs they offer. These yield, in turn, guidelines for design pedagogy.     

Students’ interest and expectancy for success while engaged in analysis- and creative design activities

Inasmuch as design is a central activity in K-12 engineering education, understanding the students’ motivation during engaging in engineering design activities will help educators to develop and evaluate strategies for engineering design challenges, and improve curriculum. The objective of this study is to better understand the relationship between students’ interest and expectancy for success while engaged in two design activities in grades 9–12. The primary difference between the two activities was the strategy used to solve the design problems from a predictive analysis and a creative approach. Constructs of motivation for students’ interest include task value (TV) and intrinsic goal orientation (IGO) and extrinsic goal orientation (EGO). Expectancy for success includes control of learning beliefs and self-efficacy for learning and performance. In this study, students (n = 31) from three high schools that implement the Project Lead the Way curriculum in three states in the US participated in the study. Immediately after completing their design projects, each student was asked to complete a modified version of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire survey instrument which evaluates their interest and expectancy for success. The results show that students were more intrinsically motivated to engage in a design activity that involves a predictive analysis than a creative approach. No significant correlation was found between students’ expectancy for success and EGO in design tasks that utilized either predictive analysis or creative approach. The study also found that TV and IGO were good predictors for students’ expectancy for success. Demographic information associated with students’ motivation in the design activities is also presented.     

Using an analogical thinking model as an instructional tool to improve student cognitive ability in architecture design learning process

Lack of creativity is a problem often plaguing students from design-related departments. Therefore, this study is intended to incorporate analogical thinking in the education of architecture design to enhance students’ learning and their future career performance. First, this study explores the three aspects of architecture design curricula, interaction and students’ cognitive development. Then the study discusses learning based on analogical thinking into two parts: analogical learning and analogical reasoning. The samples in this study were the freshmen of the Department of Architecture, China University of Technology. The model was used in a five-week unit of the course of Architecture Design, a required course for all the freshmen. Questionnaires were given to the students before and after the unit to evaluate the influences of the model in the dimensions of Teaching, Teacher-student Interactions, Student–student Interactions, Cognitive Development, and Overall Learning Performance. The questionnaire results were collected and statistically analyzed. The analysis results indicated that, the students scored significantly higher in each of the dimension after the unit than before the unit. These findings suggested that the use of an analogical thinking model can be helpful in the teaching of architecture design. Hopefully, the findings of this study can provide helpful references for not only teaching of architecture design but also future related research.     

Interdisciplinarity in design education: understanding the undergraduate student experience

Interdisciplinarity is becoming a critical issue of concern for design schools across East Asia in their attempts to provide industry graduates with the skills and competences to make creative contributions in a global economy. As a result, East Asian higher education institutions are aggressively endeavouring to provide interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum that combine traditional designerly skills with engineering knowledge and methods. The current study takes an interdisciplinary undergraduate course as case-study to examine how the pedagogic strategy of team teaching influences student learning experience. Two surveys of student learning were conducted for this research purpose. The first provided an indication of the holistic student learning experience, while the second explored the conditions of team and non-team teaching as influence upon learning experiences specifically. Results showed how students taught by a single instructor provided a more positive overall opinion of course quality and experienced significantly more encouragement to participate compared to team taught respondents. However, findings also indicated how team teaching significantly increased the students’ experience of a balanced contribution from different disciplinary perspectives and how the team teaching approach was significantly more effective in providing students with greater opportunities to understand the relevance of the different disciplines to the course subject. We conclude with a discussion of results in terms of the effective use of team teaching at undergraduate level as strategy for interdisciplinary learning experiences.     

Tracing design students’ affective journeys through reflective writing

Affection in learning embraces emotions, attitudes, values and beliefs that emerge during the learning process, and it is a vital and hidden element of learning. Studies focusing on affective, or emotional, aspects of design learning in the context of design education underscore the significance of the affective process and inform us of the connection between the creative dimension and emotions during a design activity. To this point, this paper addresses the following research question: to what extent does reflective writing disclose design students’ affective journeys throughout a semester? An empirical study is conducted to observe first-year industrial design students’ affective processes during a semester using their structured reflective diaries. The longitudinal study results show that the students exhibit certain tendencies in terms of the affective processes throughout a semester. The findings of this study are discussed in reference to peak points, anomalies and tendencies of the affective processes observed based on excerpts from the diaries. It is concluded that affective responses in design learning are multidimensional and wide-ranging.     

Consequential creativity

Creativity is an original cognitive ability and problem solving process which enables individuals to use their intelligence in a way that is unique and directed toward coming up with a product. Architectural education is one of the fields in which human creativity has been exhibited; because, it can be defined as a design study that correlates with other disciplines: social sciences, management, history, operational research, philosophy, graphic design, math and etc. These features which distinguish architecture from other disciplines ascribe different kind of responsibilities for architectural education; since beside technical and professional skills, an architect must have imagination and to be creative at many levels. Thus, this research aims at proving that students can be trained in creative thinking via acquiring specific skills and systematic techniques, which directly acts on design product. The study methodology depends on the concept of experimental research that targets at exposing students to creative problem solving experience via carrying out a creative training course that concerns “Consequential Creativity”. That experiment examined the potentiality of enhancing the students’ ability of viewing problems in non-traditional perspectives that counts on the systematic procedures of problem solving. Tools for assessment before and after training have been implemented. The Experiment findings proved that the students’ creative thinking skill has been clearly improved after attending the course. Therefore, training in creative thinking can be considered as independent courses or within specific architectural curricula.     

When mind, heart, and hands meet: communication design and designers

Hong Kong’s transformation from a manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy has prompted the local government to promote the city as a regional design center. The 2008 Policy Address delivered by Hong Kong’s Chief Executive calls for the creation of a large pool of creative and knowledgeable talent. The government recognizes that, in addition to disciplinary knowledge and skills, the high-quality workforce demanded by the economic transition requires creativity and broader competences. The University Grants Committee of Hong Kong considers outcome-based education (OBE) the best approach to developing a workforce qualified to meet the demands of the professional marketplace and, accordingly, is strongly encouraging its deployment in all higher education institutions. This article investigates the effects of the OBE approach on the curriculum revision, implementation, and evaluation of a two-semester undergraduate-level communication design course that was selected for an OBE pilot study at the author’s university. To establish stronger linkage between the academic and professional contexts, it was deemed necessary to seek the opinions of experienced design practitioners about the attributes they expect of graduates and the methods they employ in training junior designers. The author conducted in-depth interviews with 13 art/creative directors from 11 design agencies in Hong Kong in 2007. Their opinions were incorporated into the formulation of intended learning outcomes (ILOs), teaching and learning activities (TLAs), and assessment tasks (ATs) for the revised outcome-based course curriculum, which was then implemented in the 2008–2009 academic year. This article reports the findings of the aforementioned interviews and discusses the design of the revised curriculum with illustration from samples of students’ creative projects. It also provides a preliminary evaluation of the effectiveness of the course design and student learning, as revealed in quantitative and qualitative feedback from students and in the course designer’s self-reflection.     

Role of cultural inspiration with different types in cultural product design activities

Inspiration plays an important role in the design activities and design education. This paper describes “ancient cultural artefacts” as “cultural inspiration”, consisting of two types called “cultural-pictorial inspiration” (CPI) and “cultural-textual inspiration” (CTI). This study aims to test the important role of cultural inspiration with different types in cultural product design activities. Through an exploratory experiment, design students were asked to extract cultural features from ancient cultural artefacts and generate new “culturally-oriented products”. Two experts statistically analyzed the categories and quantities of cultural features, and then evaluated the creativity (originality and practicality) of design outcomes. Results show that students who worked with CTI create more creative outcomes than students who worked with CPI. It was also found that cultural features generation affect the originality of design outcomes.     

Embedded creativity: teaching design thinking via distance education

This paper shows how the design thinking skills of students learning at a distance can be consciously developed, and deliberately applied outside of the creative industries in what are termed ‘embedded’ contexts. The distance learning model of education pioneered by The Open University is briefly described before the technological innovations—which feature a fully integrated web 2.0 learning environment and design studio—and concepts behind a new course in Design Thinking are explained in detail. In teaching the more generic skills of design and developing experiential knowledge in students, the paper also explores the changing role of designers in becoming less problem-focussed and more socially engaged through the construction of design process. The paper ends by presenting the results of an extensive student and tutor survey as part of an ongoing longitudinal study which indicate that this new approach to teaching design has been successful.     

Exploring the learning problems and resource usage of undergraduate industrial design students in design studio courses

Design is a powerful weapon for modern companies so it is important to have excellent designers in the industry. The purpose of this study is to explore the learning problems and the resources that students use to overcome problems in undergraduate industrial design studio courses. A survey with open-type questions was conducted to collect data. Participants in this study were 189 undergraduate industrial design students from three universities, and two coding schema were formulated for analysing the data. The results demonstrated that the most difficult design tasks included concept generation, design presentation, and design research. The learning resources used to solve the learning problems included four categories: people, object, method, and environment. This information will increase the understanding of the learning process of students and provide a reference for teaching and the setting of learning resources in industrial design education.     

Learning creativity and design for innovation

This paper puts the case for using a pedagogical framework based on the principles of grammatical design in conjunction with conventional creative problem solving strategies in higher education to foster learning for innovation and creativity. It explores the design and delivery of an inaugural creativity and innovation course that used a combination of individual and group projects to explore the combinatorial use of creative problem solving strategies and grammatical design schemas. Using established creative thinking evaluation techniques and reflective practice journals offers a powerful path for the creative development of innovative ideas. Testing (Torrance, Creativity in the classroom, 1977) found that the figurative based creative thinking scores of an experimental group of non-designer undergraduate students significantly improved according to pre and post course tests. Two dimensional and three dimensional design assessment tasks were completed in conjunction with a series of creative problem solving teamwork sessions. Standard SELTS course evaluation also strongly suggests there is value in the active teaching of creativity strategies for the recognition of valuable problems and the development of innovative solutions.     

Creativity in Design Engineering and the Role of Knowledge: Modelling the Expert

The present study focuses on the relationship between the acquisition of design knowledge by novice design students and the quality of their designs. Design learning is typically based on action and reflection. Knowledge of solution processes, being part of this reflection, is found to be crucial in monitoring and controlling the design process and in reaching an optimal, creative result. The studies described in this article suggest a close relationship between the amount of process knowledge – knowledge of managing and monitoring the solution finding process – reported by novice designers, and the creativity of the designed product.     

A pedagogic approach to enhance creative <Emphasis Type="Italic">Ideation</Emphasis> in classroom practice

The real intent for technology education is to prepare young people so that they may fully participate and function in human society. To achieve this aim, learners are guided towards the development of attributes that include perceptive, critical, creative and informed decision making. Although effective teaching strives to inspire the creative spark in every learner, there is little guidance to inform actual classroom practice. The selection of strategies and implementation methods that engender creative responses in students, is usually left to an individual teacher’s interpretation. A working knowledge of design processing provides a most advantageous methodology to guide teaching and learning as students develop ways “of knowing through thinking and doing,” Sharma and Poole (Des Manag Inst 20(4):64–74, 2010) within classroom design and technological practice. This article looks at the broad stage of Ideation in creative design practice, where designers instigate and generate ideas within their own practice. Insight and transferable skills are observed to inform classroom practice. One event from the ideation stage of design practice processing is selected to enhance student visual communication skills. A pedagogic approach is then shared to inform the implimentation of a teaching and learning strategy that has been trialled with design (aged from 12 to 18 years) and Initial Teacher Education adult students.     

对高职艺术教育中平面色彩构成教学的思考

在高职艺术教育中,让学生在有限的时间里,较好地学习平面色彩构成课程,提高学生的设计能力和创造性思维,启迪设计灵感,这是我们在平面色彩构成教学中,需要思考的。     

Interactive effects of environmental experience and innovative cognitive style on student creativity in product design

Environmental experience can enhance the ideas of design students. Thus, this type of experience may interfere with the influence of design students’ cognitive style on creativity. The aim of this study was to examine the influence of environmental experience on the relationship between innovative cognitive style and industrial design students’ creative outcomes. The environmental experience was measured according to the total scores of the five components of sense, feel, think, act, and relate on the basis of Schmitt’s strategic experience modules. The cognitive styles were measured using Kirton’s adaption–innovation inventory, and creative works were assessed through the consensus assessment technique, which was employed by three experts. Through a field experiment and survey investigation, the analysis indicated that innovative cognitive style significantly and positively influenced creativity, but this only occurred when student was accompanied with a low degree of environmental experience (i.e., a student had a low score for environmental experience); as the student attained a high degree of environmental experience, the influence of innovative cognitive style on creativity became weakened. The experiential media suggested that the natural elements, cultural history, group travel, and narrator effectively diversified the experiences of the students and enhanced creative thinking. This paper suggests providing increased stimulation of environmental experience prior to instructing design students to engage in creative activity. Environmental experience can benefit students by enhancing their creativity.