Enhancing Creativity in the Educational Design Context: An Exploration of the Effects of Design Project-Oriented Methods on Students’ Evocation Processes and Creative Output

Abstract

One of the challenges in today’s society is to satisfy the growing need for creativity and innovation, especially in design contexts, where designers have to come up with products that are both new and adapted to their users. Although designers’ professional experience is crucial, we consider that their creative skills can be nurtured in design schools. We therefore explored the effects of two types of design project-oriented methods, which were operationalized as specific courses offered to design students. As our objective was to determine the impact of this training on creativity, we looked at both the students’ evocation processes and their creative output. In the first of two studies, 32 design students had to perform the same creative design task, but half of them received training based on brainstorming principles and the other half training based on constraint management. Here, we focused our analysis on the students’ evocation processes. In the second study, we asked 16 teachers specializing in creative activities to assess the students’ output according to different criteria. These two studies showed that the two types of training had a differential impact and allowed us to explore relationships between constraints and ideas in creative design.

Creativity enhancement methods for adults: A meta-analysis.

“…For example, although it has been postulated that prior creative abilities moderate the effectiveness of an enhancement method (e.g., Agnoli et al, 2018), prior creative ability was rarely assessed in the primary studies. Only two studies explicitly used a gifted study sample from arts education (Bonnardel & Didier, 2016; Ulger, 2016). Both studies showed mean effect sizes substantially above our meta-analytical estimate, suggesting an improved ability to enhance creative performance in gifted participants.…”

The Creative Process and Emotions of Pupils in a Training Context with a Design Project

“…For Bonnardel and Didier ( 2016 ), in design, it is important to abandon the everyday to explore the world of ideas and to propose innovative solutions. However, in the present study, pupils had rarely declared they abandoned an idea.…”

“…In this model, the activity of design demands identifying and analyzing the problem and finding innovative and appropriate situations for realization ( Bonnardel and Didier 2016 ). The activity of design includes different stages of the creative process such as definition, reflection, structuration of ideas, dealing with constraints, documenting, and taking decisions ( Bonnardel 2006 ).…”

“…The activity of design includes different stages of the creative process such as definition, reflection, structuration of ideas, dealing with constraints, documenting, and taking decisions ( Bonnardel 2006 ). During these stages, many cognitive factors are used such as divergent thinking, convergent thinking, and associative thinking to generate a hypothesis, evaluate solutions, and make appropriate decisions ( Bonnardel and Didier 2016 ). The design phase appears as a key element where the designer/engineer must abandon everyday ideas to explore the world of ideas and to propose innovative solutions ( Didier and Bonnardel 2017 ).…”

Creative Thinking Strategies on Fashion Design Programme for Undergraduate Students in Post Covid-19

“…There is no doubt that certain students' professional quality and skills will increase after they have received professional training and the clothes design does not require the memorisation of knowledge points but engage with innovative thinking (Lulu, 2020). Creativity usually defines as is usually understood, is to be capable of making something that is both original and suitable, and such expectations for designers' actions are consistent with such conceptions of creativity (Bonnardel & Didier, 2016).…”