Creativity in advertising design education: an experimental study

Abstract

Have you ever thought about why qualities whose definitions are elusive, such as those of a sunset or a half-opened rose, affect us so powerfully? According to de Saussure (Course in general linguistics, 1983), the making of meanings is closely related to the production and interpretation of signs. All types of design, including advertising design, are about meaning-making. This study examines the effectiveness of a problembased learning (PBL) approach in enhancing student designers' creative flexibility in advertising design. A semiotic approach is employed to examine hand-sketched print advertisements for a bakery promoting the metaphorical theme Bread is Life produced by participants in a series of PBL workshops (the experimental group) and a series of lecturebased workshops (the control group). The visual representations realised through these sketches in association with the metaphor were categorised into different signifiers by five experienced creative directors and are compared on an inter-group basis. The results of the semiotic analysis show the experimental group to have generated a wider variety of signifiers than the control group, thus reflecting the higher degree of creative flexibility that results from the use of a PBL approach. Theoretically, this empirical study addresses a number of conceptual issues in advertising design, creativity, problem solving, divergent thinking and semiotics. Practically, it contributes to an understanding of how a PBL approach can contribute to the enhancement of semiotic association skills amongst student designers in a professional communication context.

The Effect of Problem-Based Learning on the Creative Thinking and Critical Thinking Disposition of Students in Visual Arts Education

“…Vidic (2011) revealed that when PBL was applied, engineering students were better able to solve problems. In addition, Cheung (2011) determined that the PBL approach had a significant effect on the creative flexibility of advertising design students. Yoon, Woo, Treagust and Chandrasegaran (2014) revealed that the PBL approach had an important effect on the creative thinking skills of students in a chemistry laboratory course.…”

Teaching Creativity: Experimental Evidence of Three Strategies for Teaching Industry Standards for Creative Excellence

“…Creativity has been shown to improve through divergent-thinking techniques using metaphors and semiotics (Cheung, 2011). To demystify the creative process for students, Cotzias (1996) detailed a thinking process of listing five initial benefits about a product or brand, then developing tangents to those benefits.…”

Improving Problem-based Learning in Creative Communities Through Effective Group Evaluation

“…Hmelo-Silver (2004) said, "Educators are interested in PBL because of its emphasis on active, transferable learning and its potential for motivating students" (p. 236). Cheung (2011) reported PBL to be a successful approach in nursing, criminal justice, engineering, management, mass communication and marketing, while Artino (2008) noted that PBL methods have been employed in K-12 schools to help teach mathematics and other subjects to young children.…”

“…Belski (2009), for example, studied the effectiveness of teaching thinking and creative problem solving through the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving approach and found that students perceived the course to be useful, to improve their problem solving skills, and to help them become more systematic and structured in their approach to solving problems. Cheung (2011) looked specifically at how problem-based learning affected creativity in advertising design students over a traditional lecture approach and similarly found that the group participating in PBL exhibited much higher creative flexibility.…”

“…Problem-based learning (PBL) has been shown to be an effective teaching/learning strategy for many kinds of learning (Cheung, 2011), especially for 21st-century learners. PBL emphasizes student-focused learning (Barrows & Tamblyn, 1980) where students are primarily responsible to determine the problems, seek out the answers, evaluate the possible solutions, and revise their views based on various kinds of feedback.…”