This is a typescript version of the paper published in International Journal of Technological Design Education, 2010, 20, 345-358.]
Recognizing and fostering creativity in technological designeducation
David Cropley and Arthur Cropley
University of South Australia University of Hamburg
Author’s addressProf Arthur Cropley
Unit 3, 120 South TerraceAdelaide, SA 5000
Australiaemail: [email protected]
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Running head: Fostering creativity
Recognizing and fostering creativity in technological designeducation
Abstract
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, a variety of pathways to the
solution, no 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
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diagnosing the creativity of the designs they offer. These
yield, in turn, guidelines for design pedagogy.
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Recognizing and fostering creativity in technological design
education
Modern curriculum guidelines (e.g., International
Technology Education Association, 2000) give great emphasis to
the role of design in technology education. Indeed, as Mawson
(2003) pointed out, the design process is now well-established
as a key element of such education. However, Mawson went on to
argue that, despite this, current paradigms for teaching
design are flawed, and an alternative pedagogy is needed.
Kimbell (2001) focused on the related question of assessment:
how to accredit the designing and making of artefacts by
technology education students. The purpose of this paper is to
make a contribution to understanding these two issues in
technological design education: pedagogy and assessment.
In a comprehensive review, Lewis (2005) turned to
psychological research on creativity for ideas on what is
needed. According to him, technology education nowadays (as
well as art education, physical education, and music
education, among others) needs to promote more than simply
knowledge of materials, mastery of special technical skills
and techniques, or correct use of tools or instruments. It
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needs to go beyond these to pursue “more subjective and
elusive goals (p. 35).” Among these he includes “creative
insight (p. 35).” According to Lewis, within technology
education the teaching of design is “ … almost ideally suited
to uncovering dimensions of the creative potential of children
that would remain hidden in much of the rest of the curriculum
(p. 43).” The special property of design is what Lewis called
its “open-endedness (p. 43)”: Design problems are ill-
structured, solutions are not defined in advance, and the
pathway to the solution is open. According to Cropley (2005),
these are precisely the conditions that promote creativity, so
that there does indeed seem to be an inherent link between
design education and creativity. In this paper we will focus
on two issues: What constitutes a creative product from the
point of view of technological design and how the generation
of such products can be promoted in the classroom.
Technological design and creativity
In educational discussions, creativity is typically studied
from the point of view of the four Ps: person, process, product and
press (Barron, 1969, Rhodes, 1961). In this article, however, we
focus on only one of the Ps—product. The issue at stake is not that of
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the processes involved in creativity (for instance divergent and
convergent thinking), nor the personal properties students need in
order to be creative (such as personality or motivation), but of how
teachers can recognize creativity in products when they see it. We
also focus on products that are not only novel but also have some
practical function. Such products go beyond mere novelty: usually
they must satisfy task specifications, often externally imposed
(i.e., the products must be “relevant”), and must be capable of
fulfilling some practical purpose (they must be “effective”). A
simple example would be a bridge built to get traffic across a river.
A creative design for the bridge would not only need to display novel
features but would also need to satisfy specifications such as being
built from specified materials and within cost limits (relevance)
and being capable of carrying the required volume of traffic without
falling down (effectiveness). Cropley and Cropley (2005, p. 169)
referred to generation of such novelty as involving “functional”
creativity. The polar opposite of the functional approach is to be
found in the writings of the French novelist Theophile Gautier, who
in the foreword to his own novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1998 [1836])
argued that creativity is of necessity useless. Without wishing to
denigrate approaches to creativity which give greater emphasis to,
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for instance, sheer novelty of product or technique, or the
generation of beauty regardless of practical applications, we focus
in this article on creativity with a practical purpose.
It must be admitted that emphasis on successfully
achieving a practical purpose injects the issue of values into
the discussion: for instance, whose purpose is to be achieved
and what constitutes success? Relatively early in the modern
era Amabile (1982) emphasised that observers apply their own
subjective criteria when assessing creativity. This issue was
also raised in early discussions by Csikszentmihalyi (e.g.,
1988) and further elaborated later (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi,
1999). He argued that “creativity” is essentially something
that exists in the eye of the beholder. It involves a value
judgement made by people who are knowledgeable in a field.
Furthermore there may be disagreement among such people; one
person’s creativity may be another’s banality. This means that
the perceived creativity of technological designs produced by
students may depend on the particular observer (probably a
teacher), while even when design teachers agree, their views
may differ from those of judges from a different design
culture such as teachers of traditional academic subjects,
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educational theorists, or members of the public. However,
Cropley and Cropley (2008) raised the promise of a “universal
aesthetic” of creativity which would transcend design
cultures.
The extent to which functional creativity as defined above is
the same as creativity in a purely aesthetic sense, or is linked to
creative production in fine arts, literature, music, or similar
domains is not clear. However, linking creativity with production of
practically useful novel products (while bearing in mind the value
issues just outlined)—especially technological/engineering
products—is by no means far-fetched. Indeed, the crucial event that
started the modern creativity era was the successful launching in
1957 of Sputnik I, when the western world’s engineers were
judged to have been beaten in the first event in the space
race by the engineers of the Soviet Union as a result of their
inadequate levels of creativity. This means that the jumping
off point for the modern creativity era was interest in
functional creativity—generation of novelty that is useful for
practical purposes—and involved technological design.
Furthermore, in the ensuing search for the source of weakness
that had led to the western world’s deficiencies in functional
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creativity, the problem was quickly attributed to defects in
education. Thus, the major issue when the modern creativity
era began about 50 years ago was not questions of
artistic/aesthetic creativity or the pursuit of truth and
beauty, but fostering via technology education the generation
of novel products capable of contributing to the welfare and
safety of society.
Despite this, with the passage of time theoretical
discussions of what creativity is good for came to be
dominated by humanistic writers (e.g., Maslow, 1973; May,
1976; Rogers, 1961), who saw its value as lying in its
beneficial effects on personal growth, self-fulfilment, and
similar aspects of individual well-being. The result was that
the purpose of fostering creativity in the classroom came to
be seen as promoting the personal development of individual
children. Usefulness of products came to be under-emphasized,
with the emphasis being placed on cognitive processes
favourable for creativity (such as divergent thinking), and
personal properties that encouraged people to be creative
(such as daring or unconventionality). Products were only
interesting to the extent that they gave evidence of
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appropriate processes and creativity-facilitating personal
properties. All that was required was that they should be
surprising—Lewis cited Bruner’s definition of creativity as
involving “effective surprise” (Bruner, 1962, p. 37)—with
practical usefulness often ignored.
In fact, there is well-documented interest—going back to
the ancient world—in creativity as a socially-useful
phenomenon. The Chinese Emperor, Han Wudi, who reigned until
87BCE, was intensely interested in finding innovative thinkers
and giving them high rank in the civil service, and reformed
the method of selection of mandarins to achieve this. Both
Francis Bacon (1909 [1604]) and René Descartes (1991 [1644]),
two of the founders of modern science, saw scientific
creativity as involving the harnessing of the forces of nature
for the betterment of the human condition. Interestingly, and not
insignificantly, this statement is very close to modern
definitions of the discipline of engineering. For example, the
US Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)
defines engineering as:
“… the profession in which a knowledge of the
mathematical and natural
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sciences gained by study, experience, and practice
is applied with judgement
to develop ways to utilize economically, the
materials and forces of nature for
the benefit of mankind.”
Teachers’ attitudes to creativity
For at least the last 30-40 years teachers have been expressing
positive views about creativity and the need to foster it in the
classroom (e.g., Feldhusen & Treffinger, 1975). Despite this,
however, research over several decades in a number of different
countries, e.g., Australia (Howieson, 1984), Germany (Brandau, et
al., 2007), Nigeria (Obuche, 1986), Poland (Karwowski, 2007),
Singapore (Tan, 2003), Turkey (Oral & Guncer, 1993), the United
Kingdom (e.g., Brady, 1970), and the USA (Dawson, D’Andrea,
Affinito, & Westby, 1999; Scott, 1999), has consistently reported
that in practice teachers are indifferent or even antagonistic to
creative children.
The problem is by no means confined to school-level education.
Cropley and Cropley (2005) reviewed findings on fostering
creativity in engineering education in universities in the
United States of America, and concluded that there is little
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support for creative students. It is true that there has been
some effort in recent years to encourage creativity in
colleges and universities: For instance, in 1990 the National
Science Foundation (NSF) established the Engineering Coalition
of Schools for Excellence and Leadership (ECSEL). This has the
goal of transforming undergraduate engineering education.
However, a review of current practice throughout higher
education in the United States conducted 10 years later
(Fasko, 2000-2001) pointed out that the available information
indicates that deliberate training in creativity is rare.
The problem is also not confined to the United States of
America. Although the European Union has established programs
bearing the names of famous innovators such as SOCRATES or
LEONARDO, it is astonishing that in the guidelines for the
development of education in the Community concepts like
“innovation” or “creativity” simply do not exist. To take a
second example, at least until recently the Max Planck
Institute for Human Development, Germany’s leading research
institute for the development of talent in research in the
social sciences, had never supported a project on the topics
of creativity or innovation. In a personal letter dated April
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26, 2006, the office of the President of the Max Planck
Society confirmed that the organization does not see
creativity as a significant area of research.
In his review, Lewis (2005) summarized the situation in what we
regard as moderate terms: “ … there are indications in the literature
that we still have some way to go before creativity becomes a more
central feature of the teaching of design in the United States and
elsewhere (p. 44).” In view of the consistent reports of positive
teacher lip-service to creativity but negative attitudes to
students who display it, Cropley and Cropley (2009) adopted the
optimistic position that the problem is more a matter of lack of
information than of malice. Lewis (2005, p. 46) drew up a list of the
information that is required, and included as the very first areas
requiring more knowledge:
(a) implications for design/problem solving pedagogy and
(b) implications for assessment.
The purpose of the present paper is to offer practical guidelines for
design education in both these areas. How can teachers of design
recognize functional creativity (practically useful creativity) in
students’ work, and what can they do in their teaching practice to
encourage more of it.
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Assessing the creativity of solutions to technological design
problems
Although it may seem strange to commence with assessment
rather than teaching and learning practice, our approach to
pedagogy derives from what it is that students ought to be
producing, so that we start with products and work backwards
to methods for encouraging generation of such products. It is
obvious that a creative product involves bringing something
new into existence. Without variation from what already exists
there would be no creative products. For some writers (see
Gautier above), departure from the usual is sufficient.
However, in the context of functional creativity novelty,
although absolutely essential, is not sufficient on its own.
Not every departure from what already exists is functionally
creative. Cattell and Butcher (1968, p. 271) popularised the
term “pseudo-creativity” to refer to variability whose novelty
derives only from non-conformity, lack of discipline, blind
rejection of what already exists and simply letting oneself
go. To this can be added “quasi-creativity” (Cropley, 1997, p.
89, translating Heinelt, 1974), which has many of the elements
of genuine creativity—such as a high level of fantasy—but only
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a tenuous connection with reality. An example would be the
novelty generated in daydreams.
The products which result from pseudo- and quasi-
creativity may possess a raw potential for creativity, but at
least one further property is vital for them to be functional.
Amabile and Tighe (1993, p. 9) emphasized that products must
be “appropriate,” “correct,” “useful,” or “valuable.” We refer
to such properties as involving “relevance and effectiveness”.
Terms such as “correct” or “useful” clearly involve value
judgements, as was discussed above. From the point of view of
teachers of technological design, however, relevance and
effectiveness is a necessary property. It would not be
unreasonable for a teacher to ask a student who had been given
the problem of designing, let us say, a desk that would be
comfortable for both very tall and very short students, but
instead folded the sketching paper into a paper aeroplane and
threw it across the room, to show how this solution helped
solve the design problem at hand, i.e., to question where its
relevance and effectiveness lay.
Relevance and effectiveness is indispensable for solving
a problem, and indeed problems can be solved through relevance
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and effectiveness alone, although such solutions are not
creative but merely routine. Nonetheless, a routine solution
is still a solution, and may prove to be very useful. The
addition of novelty leads to an “original” solution—a relevant
and effective solution that does the job in a new way. These
two criteria of a solution (relevance and effectiveness;
novelty) are joint pre-requisites for functional creativity:
Both must be present for a solution to reach the lowest level
of creativity, which we refer to as “originality” (e.g.,
Cropley & Cropley, 2005, 2009).
However, a creative solution to a design problem can go
further by being “elegant.” At its simplest this means that
good design solutions look good. Grudin (1990) referred to
“the grace of great things.” Such grace, or elegance as we
call it, is often readily recognisable: as Maier and Rechtin
(2000) put it, citing Wernher von Braun, “The eye is a good
architect. Believe it!” Elegance adds value to a relevant and
effective solution that is already original, and this
increases its creativity. In the real world, elegance may mean
that a solution to a design problem is recognized for what it
is, is accepted, applauded and adopted, while it may also mean
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that a particular solution defeats a rival solution, for
instance in the market-place.
Finally, comes what we now call “genesis”: the property
of a relevant and effective, novel and elegant solution that
makes it transferable to different (quite possibly
unanticipated) situations, opens up new ways of looking at
known problems, or draws attention to the existence of
previously unnoticed problems. In this way, a generic solution
goes beyond a “merely” elegant one and yields the highest
level of functional creativity—innovation. A simple example of
a solution that involved a new way of looking at a known
problem can be seen in the work of a group of civil engineers
who were confronted with the necessity of drilling a large
number of holes in extremely hard concrete slabs so that the
slabs could be bolted together. The drill bits kept on
snapping and the problem was initially looked at as that of
designing tougher and sharper bits. It was only when the task
was redefined as involving avoiding the need for holes
altogether that a solution was found: the concrete slabs were
redesigned in such a way that they slotted together without
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bolts. This opened up a new approach to construction with
concrete slabs.
The various levels of creativity are depicted in Table 1.
--------------------------------- Insert Table 1 about here ---------------------------------
We take the view that the progression from routine, to
original, then elegant and finally innovative solutions
represent not only an increase in amount of creativity
(quantitative difference in creativity), but also a change in
kind of creativity (qualitative difference). A generic
solution is thus not only more creative than a routine one,
but is also a different kind of solution: It affects the field
into which it is introduced not just to a greater extent than
a routine one, but also in a different way, for instance by
changing the prevailing paradigm. An example would be the
design of the Sydney Opera House which changed the way civil
engineers thought about constructing large buildings (for
instance, it introduced the idea of building the roof first).
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This approach to recognising functional creativity can be
applied to technological design education in the area of
assessment, i.e., the second area in which Lewis (2005) called
for more information about creativity and how to foster it in
the classroom. A creative design product can be assessed
according to the criteria of relevance and effectiveness,
novelty, elegance, and genesis. What is needed for doing this,
however, are guidelines for teachers that enable them to
recognize these criteria when they see them in students’ work.
Hints about what to look for are provided by a number of
writers: Savransky (2000) argued that creative solutions in
engineering involve one or more of six principles:
Improvement, diagnostics, trimming, analogy, synthesis, and
genesis. Sternberg, Kaufman, and Pretz (2002) constructed a
similar list including conceptual replication, redefinition,
forward incrementation, advance forward incrementation,
redirection, reconstruction and redirection, and re-
initiation. In Table 2 we have mapped such “indicators,”
largely based on the work of the authors just mentioned, onto
the four “criteria”.
--------------------------------------
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Insert Table 2 about here
-------------------------------------
The indicators listed in Table 2, such as redefinition,
generation or pleasingness call upon teachers to make
subjective judgements. However, Hennessey (1994) reported
inter-rater agreement ranging up to .93 even among untrained
undergraduates who rated the creativity of geometric designs
or Picasso drawings, while internal reliabilities of
individual students’ ratings of creativity ranged from .73
to .93. Vosburg (1998) also reported that untrained university
students who rated products on 7-point scales such as “very
complex–not at all complex” or “very understandable–not at all
understandable” achieved inter-rater reliabilities of
about .90, despite the subjectivity of such properties.
Turning directly to the indicators in Table 2, Cropley
and Cropley (2009) reported that a small group of 13 teachers
(9 women and 4 men) aged from the early 20s to the early 50s,
who used these indicators to assess the creativity of models
of wheeled vehicles designed and built by students (see below)
had no problems understanding and applying the indicators,
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agreed among themselves (inter-rater agreement), and achieved
a reasonable test-retest reliability of 0.79 (Cropley &
Cropley, 2009). It is true that the raters in both the studies
cited in the previous paragraph as well as in the Cropley and
Cropley pilot study had a similar socio-cultural background,
so that the high level of agreement might be to some extent an
artefact of their homogeneous design culture. However, design
teachers using the indicators in Table 2 would also be
expected to share at least a broadly similar design culture,
so that it is not unreasonable to hope for substantial
agreement among them too
In a more substantial study of the usefulness of the
criteria and indicators in Table 2, Haller, Courvoisier, and
Cropley (2009) used them to rate designs for a novel hands-
free mobile phone holder made by 55 visual art students at two
schools in Switzerland. These designs were rated by a total of
10 experts (design teachers at the schools in question), 7
males and 3 females with an age range of 35-59 and from 3-39
years of teaching experience. The designs were also rated by 5
novices (people with no expertise in design), 2 men and 3
women ranging in age from 24-33. The median reliability
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(Cronbach’s α) of the overall scores assigned by the 15 judges
was 0.85. Coefficients for the reliability of the total scores
for the novice raters ranged from 0.74-0.92, while for the
experts they ranged, with one exception, from 0.75 to 0.96
(one expert’s ratings were noticeably less reliable than those
of all others), i.e., the range of reliabilities was almost
identical for experts and novices. These findings suggest that
long and highly focused experience in the area of design
(i.e., extensive exposure to a common design culture) is not
necessary for reliable ratings.
An idea of the validity of the scale can be obtained from
the fact that inter-rater agreement on the overall creativity
of each of the 55 designs ranged from 0.64-0.89. (An inter-
rater reliability of 1.00 would indicate perfect agreement
among all 15 raters.) Thus, the judges tended to have a shared
understanding of what is meant by the criteria and indicators.
Haller, Courvoisier and Cropley (2009) also calculated the
level of agreement between a subjective global rating of the
overall creativity of each of the 55 designs made by each
judge (without reference to the criteria and indicators in
Table 2) and the total scores they subsequently assigned the
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designs using these indicators. The level of agreement ranged
from 0.66-0.89. Thus, the total score yielded by the
indicators agreed substantially with raters’ intuitive global
assessments of creativity.
A pedagogy for creative design
Can creativity be taught?
The first issue that must be dealt with is that of
whether it is possible to train creativity at all. In a
comprehensive recent study, Scott, Leritz, and Mumford (2004)
identified 70 studies published in or after 1980 in which the
extent to which creativity training enabled people to behave
more creatively was tested empirically. The studies had to
meet strict methodological criteria: There had to be a
specific focus on creativity training, the procedure employed
in the training had to be clearly described, the measures used
to assess the effectiveness of the training had to be
identified and described, and statistical data on
effectiveness had to be provided. There also had to be some
kind of control condition, either a control group or a test–
retest design. Participants in the studies were both males and
females, were aged both under and over 14, were tested in both
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occupational and school settings, and were both gifted and of
average ability. Creativity-training procedures included
cognitive, social, personality, motivational, and combined
procedures (for an overview of a number of these see Cropley &
Cropley 2009, pp. 216-223), and creativity was assessed using
cognitive tests such as divergent thinking tests, motivational
and attitude scales, and ratings by judges (for an overview of
such assessment procedures see Cropley & Cropley, 2009,
pp.184-197).
Scott and his colleagues subjected these 70 studies to a
meta-analysis. Meta-analyses combine the information contained
in a number of smaller-scale studies in order to detect
relationships (in this case changes in creativity resulting
from training) that might go unnoticed in smaller individual
studies because of the low power of statistical tests with
small samples Meta-analysis can be used to examine the way a
treatment (such as provision of creativity training) affects a
dependent variable (such as subsequent creative performance)
even when the variables are measured using different
instruments with a wide variety of participants. As is common
in meta-analytic studies, Scott, Leritz, and Mumford (2004)
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tested the extent to which creativity training influenced
creative behaviour by calculating effect strength.
Huang (2005) too conducted a methodologically rigorous
meta-analysis of 62 empirical studies of the way creativity
training influenced the behaviour of schoolchildren,
university students and adults. His data were obtained with
participants ranging from preschoolers (under 6 years old), to
school age children (6-18 years in age), college students aged
19-22, and employed adults (mainly teachers and nurses)
ranging in age from 25-60. The data also included American
Indian participants in the second and sixth grades, hearing-
impaired youngsters aged 8 and 10, and five- and six-year-olds
from a socially disadvantaged background. In terms of ability,
participants ranged from learning disabled to gifted. The
procedures for training creativity included Creative Problem
Solving (CPS), other formal training programs (such as the
Purdue Creative Thinking Program or the Khatena Training
Method), workshops, school programs, and special creativity
techniques. Creativity was assessed using judges’ ratings,
attitude questionnaires (i.e., self-ratings), and various
widely-used creativity tests, especially the Torrance Tests of
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Creative Thinking. Huang also subjected his findings to a
meta-analysis, and concluded that there was a 95% probability
that the effect strength of creativity training lay
between .62 and .71. This indicates a strong relationship
between training and changes in creative behaviour (Cohen,
1988).
Both Scott, Leritz and Mumford (2004) and Huang (2005)
concluded that training in divergent thinking and
encouragement of motivation known to facilitate creativity—
such as dissatisfaction with the status quo or willingness to
take risks— fostered creativity. This was most pronounced when
the criterion of creativity involved cognitive processes
(i.e., there were substantial improvements in people’s
divergent thinking and problem solving after training). Within
the cognitive domain, the single largest benefit of creativity
training was greater originality of thinking, although
training also enhanced fluency, flexibility, and elaboration
of thought. The second strongest effect of training was on
creative performance (i.e., the products people produced after
training were more creative). There were also noteworthy
changes in attitudes. The effectiveness of creativity training
26
was strong in both children and adults and in both educational
and non-educational settings (e.g., at work), and in both
gifted and non-gifted people. This was true for both males and
females, although more marked in males, especially with regard
to divergent thinking.
Thus, although there are dissenting voices such as Baer
(1998) and Dow and Mayer (2004), there are grounds for
optimism. Of great interest, however, is that Scott Leritz and
Mumford (2004) found differences between training procedures
in their effectiveness. When cognitive, social, personality,
motivational, and combined training procedures were compared,
it was found that the cognitive approach produced the largest
changes. Scott, Leritz and Mumford (2004) then divided
cognitive training procedures according to the particular
process that each procedure emphasized, and found that
training in problem identification, idea generation, and
conceptual combination was most effective.
Scott, Leritz and Mumford (2004) also found that the best
way to foster these processes was to give participants
opportunities to analyse novel, ill-defined problems, whereas
mere wild deviation from the usual (pseudo-creativity), or
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unfettered expression of unexplored ideas (quasi-creativity)
was actually negatively related to the effectiveness of
training. It was also found that highly organized and
systematic training based on realistic examples and involving
substantial periods of structured, focused practice (i.e.,
relevant to a real field or domain) was most effective, not
short bursts of unstructured work on an ad hoc collection of
activities that might or might not be connected with the
setting in which people were supposed to become more creative.
Finally, training that started by introducing relevant general
concepts and basic principles then moved to targeted practice
aimed at acquiring specific skills achieved more than holistic
training.
These findings suggest that reality-oriented creativity
involving knowledge and skill, i.e., functional creativity,
can be trained. From the findings of Scott, Leritz and Mumford
(2004) we have worked out five principles for successfully
doing this. These are:
● Give students targeted practice in solving (design) problems (not for instance
simply generating “blind” novelty).
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● Give students highly organized and systematic training based on realistic
examples from the field they are learning about.
● Base the creativity training just mentioned on extended periods of structured, focused
practice (not for instance an occasional “creativity” session).
● Base training on broad knowledge and skills (relevant generalconcepts and basic
principles).
● Move from broad knowledge and skills to targeted practice
aimed at acquiring specific knowledge and skills.
Creativity-oriented pedagogy: A case study
Imparting broad knowledge
The principles just stated give strong support to the idea
that design pedagogy has high potential for fostering
creativity. The open-endedness of design problems stressed by
Lewis (2005) and their link to real-life professional/artistic
activities in technology, art, music, and the like satisfy two
of the main requirements just outlined. The material presented
in Tables 1 and 2 provides more concrete insights into what
should be taught and how, i.e., a creativity-oriented pedagogy.
29
Cropley and Cropley (2009) presented a case-study of a
class that set out to put some of the ideas spelled out above
into practice. This involved a second year engineering class on
engineering innovation in an Australian university. A total of
61 men aged from 18 to 25 years completed the project. These
people received theoretical lectures on creativity (see below)
and designed, built and demonstrated a model of a wheeled
vehicle propelled by the energy stored in a mousetrap and
capable of covering at least 1m. Lectures involved two kinds of
content: content focused on learning about creativity and
content that involved actual creative activity. The theoretical
material aimed at encouraging:
1. creative thinking skills;
2. positive attitudes to creativity and creative
performance;
3. motivation to be creative;
4. perception of oneself as capable of being creative;
5. positive mood in problem-solving situations;
6. recognising and placing a high value on the creativity
of other students,
as well as one’s own; and
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7. reduction of anxiety about creativity.
The aim was to provide students with a practical, down-to-
earth concept of creativity, and thus reduce their scepticism
or other concerns about this topic. The main topics dealt with
were:
1. What has creativity got to do with engineers?
2. Why do engineers have problems with creativity?
3. What are the psychological elements of creativity?
4. What are the characteristics of a creative product?
5. How can you solve problems creatively?
6. What blocks creativity in technology?
This material was intended to provide students with an
understandable, practical approach to creativity that stressed
cognitive (how do you get ideas?), motivational (why should
you be creative?), affective (what effect do feelings,
attitudes, and the like have on creativity?), and social (how
do other people affect your creativity?) aspects. The actual
content was largely presented via case studies (e.g., insulin
pens, Kevlar, disposable contact lenses, Gore-Tex fabric,
Xerox, the GE, Rolls Royce and P&W aero-engine maintenance
concept, and the development of EBay). Presentation and
31
analysis of the case studies emphasized the four components
just listed: cognition, motivation, affect and social factors.
Making a creative design
The second element of the class was the actual design and
construction of a novel but effective (functionally creative)
working model of a “wheeled vehicle powered by the energy
stored in a mousetrap and capable of moving at least 1m.” (It
should be borne in mind that this problem was set for
engineering students, so that there was an emphasis on an
engineering-oriented product. Design is, of course, not
synonymous with engineering, and other disciplines would focus
on problems relevant to the discipline in question.) In the
first 8 weeks of the semester, in a 2-hour laboratory session
that accompanied the theory classes each week, students worked
in groups of three on designing and building their models
(except for two groups which were reduced to two members by
dropouts). Later, the models were presented to other students
during the lab period, and publicly analysed by the instructor
in terms of the criteria in Table 2. These analyses were
discussed with the entire class.
32
In an earlier publication (Cropley, 2005) we went into
some detail of the use of the indicators in Table 2 to grade
the mousetrap-powered wheeled vehicles. (The mousetrap was a
conventional wooden trap with a spring loaded wire arm that is
released by tripping a lever when a mouse tries to remove a
bait, traditionally a piece of cheese. The arm then flies in
an arc and strikes the mouse with considerable force.) Most
students succeeded in designing and building a model that
worked, but the various designs received overall scores
ranging from below 10 to above 17. It is not strictly relevant
for the purposes of this article, but the models included a
very lifelike racing car built around the mousetrap and a
small paper cylinder (redefinition of “wheeled”) placed
alongside a tiny fan mounted on an axle. Both the car and the
fan were powered by a string wound around an axle and attached
to the spring—upon being released the spring flew in an arc,
pulling the string, which unwound from the axle causing it to
spin, and in the one case drove the car forward and in the
other caused the fan to spin, which in turn propelled the
lightweight paper wheel forward. Other designs included a
steam engine driven by burning the mousetrap, i.e., by
33
releasing the chemical energy stored in the mousetrap, and
simply attaching the mousetrap to a model car with a long
string and throwing the mousetrap off the table, i.e.,
utilising the force of gravity acting on the mousetrap’s mass.
The rating system functioned well in making it possible
to explain to students where their designs was highly
“creative” (in our sense), and where they displayed
weaknesses. For instance, the fan car mentioned above was
particularly strong on diagnosis, replication, re-direction,
re-initiation, and generation (see Table 2), but fell down on
convincingness and pleasingness. The model racing car, on the
other hand, scored highly on convincingness and pleasingness,
but did little diagnosis, prescription or prognosis. Students
were quickly able to see the point and even to make their own
suggestions for reducing weaknesses or building on strengths.
Closing remarks
In order to harness “…the materials and forces of nature
for the benefit of mankind,” as defined by ABET, and not
merely to expend those resources without regard to the wider
cost, creativity must play an integral role. To teach students
how to achieve creative designs, we must first be able to
34
specify what is creative in their designs. The concept of
functional creativity leads directly to an approach to
assessment based on a hierarchy of four criteria: relevance
and effectiveness; novelty; elegance; genesis. The indicators
of these four elements of creativity presented in this article
are relatively fuzzy, but this can be seen as an advantage in
the sense of Kimbell (2001), because a degree of fuzziness in
concepts encourages a holistic approach and leaves room for
the exercise of teachers’ professional judgement. These
considerations address Lewis’s (2005) issue of assessment.
Once students’ design work can be assessed for its creativity,
an appropriate pedagogy can be constructed around this, thus
addressing Lewis’ second issue. The class described in the
case study presented here gives some idea of what such a
pedagogy could be like.
35
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Table 1: The hierarchical organization of solutions
Criterion
Kind of Solution
Quasi-creative
Routine
Original Elegant
Inno-vative
Effectiveness
- + + + +
Novelty + - + + +Elegance - - - + +Genesis - - - - +
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Table 2. Indicators of creativity in solutions
Criterion of creativity
Kindof solution
Propertyof the
solution
Indicator
Relevance and Effectiveness
routine
Solutiondisplays
knowledge ofexisting factsand principles
• correctness (solution accuratelyreflects what is already known) • performance (solution does what it is supposed to) • appropriateness (solution fits within task constraints)
Novelty
original
Solution drawsattention to
problems in whatalready exists
• diagnosis (solution draws attention to shortcomings in what already exists) • prescription (solution shows howwhat already exists could be improved)• prognosis (solution helps beholder to anticipate likely effects ofchanges )
Solution adds to
existingknowledge
• replication (solution is capable of being transferred to new settings) • redefinition (solution helps beholder see new ways of using it) • combination (solution involves new mixtures of existing elements); • incrementation (solution extends the known in an existing direction)
45
• reconstruction (solution shows that an approach previously abandoned is still useful)
Solutiondevelops
newknowledge
• redirection (solution shows how to extend the known in a new direction) • reinitiation (solution indicates a radically new approach) • generation (solution offers a fundamentally new perspective)
Elegance
elegant
Solution strikesobservers asbeautiful(externalelegance)
• recognition (the beholder sees at once that the solution “makes sense”) • convincingness (the solutionis skilfully executed, well-finished, etc)• pleasingness (the beholder finds the solution neat, graceful, welldone)
Solution is wellworked out andhangs together
(internalelegance)
• completeness (the solution is well worked out and “rounded”)• harmoniousness (the elements of the solution fit together in an internally consistent way)
Genesis
innovative
Ideas in thesolution gobeyond theimmediatesituation
• foundationality (the solution suggests a general basis for furtherwork)• transferability (the solution offers ideas for solving apparently unrelated problems)
• germinality (the solution suggests new
ways of looking at existingproblems)
46