Abstract
The study of creativity in design has tended to emphasise its value, scarcity, and location in the individual designer rather than in choices made by a consuming public in the context of a wider culture. This paper, in presenting and developing a view of creativity in design as a normal concept, will present initial results from a study of 1038 student design assignments obtained from a distance-learning course in Design Thinking from The Open University in the UK. We show how ‘normal’ distributions of design outputs can be contived from a structured design process and argue that the creativity that is displayed is a natural result of the ‘grammar’ of that process, in a similar way to the syntax of a sentence allowing new combinations of words and meanings to be easily formed. Seen like this creativity is less of an individual ‘gift’, as some theories imply, but a common everyday response to openended problems.
Keywords
Creativity, assessment of creativity, originality, design process, design education, design assessment
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/learnxdesign.2013.085
Citation
Lloyd, P.,and Jones, D.(2013) Normal Creativity: What 1,038 t-shirts can tell you about design education, in Reitan, J.B., Lloyd, P., Bohemia, E., Nielsen, L.M., Digranes, I., & Lutnæs, E. (eds.), DRS // Cumulus: Design Learning for Tomorrow, 14-17 May, Oslo, Norway. https://doi.org/10.21606/learnxdesign.2013.085
Creative Commons License
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Included in
Normal Creativity: What 1,038 t-shirts can tell you about design education
The study of creativity in design has tended to emphasise its value, scarcity, and location in the individual designer rather than in choices made by a consuming public in the context of a wider culture. This paper, in presenting and developing a view of creativity in design as a normal concept, will present initial results from a study of 1038 student design assignments obtained from a distance-learning course in Design Thinking from The Open University in the UK. We show how ‘normal’ distributions of design outputs can be contived from a structured design process and argue that the creativity that is displayed is a natural result of the ‘grammar’ of that process, in a similar way to the syntax of a sentence allowing new combinations of words and meanings to be easily formed. Seen like this creativity is less of an individual ‘gift’, as some theories imply, but a common everyday response to openended problems.