Normal creativity : What 1,038 t‐shirts can tell you about design education

Lloyd, Peter and Jones, Derek (2013). Normal creativity : What 1,038 t‐shirts can tell you about design education. In: 2nd International Conference for Design Education Researchers, 14-17 May 2013, Oslo, pp. 307–321.

URL: http://www.hioa.no/eng/content/download/27753/3410...

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 open- ended problems.

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