creativity, design and education

creativity, design and education Theories, positions and challenges The concept of creativity is simultaneously one of the most celebrated, confusing and contested ideas in the contemporary world.

creativity, design and education

This book is an exploration of the concept of creativity, its relationship to design and to various forms of practice. The work asks whether it is possible to assess creativity and if so, how? Drawing on the opinions of 40 experts, the book provides an inclusive background to dominant theories of creativity and associated educational practices.

theories, positions and challenges

Regardless of whether the field in question is art, literature or design, creativity is typically venerated above almost all other material properties or personal prospects. Yet, as a society we have no common definition of creativity, we rarely articulate just how important it is and there is even less clarity in how we teach or assess it. This is not to suggest that creativity is poorly understood— there is a substantial body of scholarship which explores almost every dimension of creativity—but rather, that despite this level of critical review, creativity remains a divisive topic.

Anthony Williams • Michael J. Ostwald • Hedda Haugen Askland

creativity, design and education Theories, positions and challenges

creativity, design and education Theories, positions and challenges Anthony Williams • Michael J. Ostwald • Hedda Haugen Askland

The book represents one of the two main outcomes of the ALTC project Assessing Creativity: Strategies and Tools to Support Teaching and Learning in Architecture and Design, which is set to conclude in October 2011. Support for this project has been provided by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, an initiative of the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Ltd. This work is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence. Under this Licence you are free to copy, distribute, display and perform the work and to make derivative works. Attribution: You must attribute the work to the original authors and include the following statement: Support for the original work was provided by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Ltd, an initiative of the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. Noncommercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike: If you alter, transform, or build on this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the licence terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second St, Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA. Requests and inquiries concerning these rights should be addressed to the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, PO Box 2375, Strawberry Hills NSW 2012 or through the website: http://www.altc.edu.au 2010 Australian Learning and Teaching Council, Sydney ISBN 978-0-9805545-3-3 Cover image: Roofscape detail, Dancing Building, Prague, Frank Gehry Architect Photograph by Michael J. Ostwald Design: Kathleen Phelps Printing: Print National, NSW, Australia Table of contributors

Table of contents Preface Part One – Complexities and Common Themes Reviewing the Theories: An Introduction to Creativity Reviewing the Responses: Structuring the Matrices

Part Two – From Theory to Practice: 39 Opinions Part Three – A Multivalent Reading Matrix 1 – Discipline and Approach Matrix 2 – Overarching Principles Matrix 3 – The 4Ps Matrix 4 – Key words Matrix 5 – Assessment

Part Four – Reflections Heuristic Reflections on Assessing Creativity in the Design Disciplines by Ken Friedman

References Acknowledgements Note About the Authors

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Table of contributors Brit Andresen – The University of Queensland Hernan Casakin – Ariel University Centre of Samaria Geoff Clark –University of Tasmania Ian Clayton – University of Tasmania Joanne Cys – University of South Australia Barbara de la Harpe – RMIT University Halime Demirkan – Bilkent University Arne Dietrich – American University of Beirut Ruth Dineen – University of Wales Institute Peter Downton – RMIT University Ernest Edmonds – University of Technology, Sydney Ranulph Glanville – Independent academic Tom Heneghan – Tokyo University of the Arts Ben Hughes – Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design Sandra Kaji-O’Grady – The University of Sydney Gini Lee – Queensland University of Technology Mirjana Lozanovska – Deakin University Mary Lou Maher – The University of Sydney, University of Maryland Harry Margalit – The University of New South Wales Alex Milton – Heriot-Watt University Andrea Mina – RMIT University Greg Missingham – The University of Melbourne Clare Newton – The University of Melbourne

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Margaret Portillo – University of Florida Antony Radford – The University of Adelaide Susan Savage – Queensland University of Technology Christoph Schnoor – Unitec Institute of Technology Alex Selenitsch – The University of Melbourne Des Smith – Deakin University Ian Solomonides – Macquarie University Mark Taylor – Queensland University of Technology William M. Taylor – The University of Western Australia Sarah Treadwell – The University of Auckland Richard Tucker – Deakin University Robyn Tudor – The University of New South Wales Leon van Schaik – RMIT University Louise Wallis – University of Tasmania Julie Werner – RMIT University Peter Wood – Victoria University of Wellington

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Preface Discovering difference, crossing boundaries and charting common ground

To this ‘confusion’ [surrounding definitions] thinkers respond by proposing a principle of separation that puts elements and discourse in their respective places. The following pages make a simple argument against [such a process] of ‘distinction’: that the confusion they denounce, in the name of a thought that puts each thing in its proper element, is in fact the very knot by which thoughts, practices and affects are instituted and assigned a territory or a ‘specific’ object. Jacques Rancière (2009: 3-4) The concept of creativity is simultaneously one of the most celebrated, confusing and contested ideas in the contemporary world. Regardless of whether the field in question is art, literature or design, creativity is typically venerated above almost all other material properties or personal prospects. Yet, as a society we have no common definition of creativity, we rarely articulate just how important it is and there is even less clarity in how we teach or assess it. This is not to suggest that creativity is poorly understood—there is a substantial body of scholarship which explores almost every dimension of creativity—but rather, that despite this level of critical review, creativity remains a divisive topic. How then, can we develop new knowledge that will support the improved propagation and critical reception of creative works? Or at a more practical level, what can we do to support better teaching and assessment of creativity? The French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2007) observed that in Ancient Greece, the development of new knowledge was typically established through a process of crossing boundaries. Regardless of whether the crossing entailed terrestrial travel from the Senate to the docks to discuss the condition of the fleet, or aquatic voyages from one nation state to another to learn new methods for harvesting grain, the act of crossing boundaries was seen as a precursor to developing a heightened level of understanding.

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In part, the act of crossing boundaries was thought to be important because it suggests a willingness to enter into, both physically and conceptually, a new space. Rancière (2007) proposes that the act of crossing is an essential process for philosophers and scholars; it is both a primary learning opportunity and is central to the utopian impulse to seek to improve the world. While Rancière is better known as a political philosopher, his early work was largely concerned with education and emancipation (see Rancière 1991). It was during that period when he first developed a metaphorical spatial language to describe different levels of engagement with the boundary conditions and qualities of a discipline, field or theme. Rancière (1995) proposes that we are often too close to a large topic to make sense of its machinations, and so we must develop a meta-narrative—treating a new discipline as a geographic region to be explored—that allows us to retain a critical distance, while still directly engaged in the key concerns. George Robertston (1994: 2) describes Rancière’s concept of crossing boundaries as necessitating a ‘narrative of space and difference’, a process of philosophical geographical exploration which ‘provokes new concepts, new ways of seeing and [of ] being’. For Rancière (1994: 30) the process of crossing, metaphorically present in narratives of travel and exploration, involves bridging the ‘narrow and vertiginous gap which separates the inside […] from the outside’ or the ‘here’ from the ‘there’. Boundaries are the divisions—conceptual, social, cultural and political—which define the world. However, in order to improve our understanding of the world, or promote equity and develop respect, we must engage in the act of crossing. This is especially important when entering into an intricate and contradictory territory. One such territory is creativity; a concept held in high regard by the community, a dream of artists, authors, designers and performers, and the topic of many hundreds of books. But how can we approach this territory and what can we learn from it? If creativity is thought of in Rancière’s (2004a, 2004b) terms—as a meta-political landscape—then it would be a loosely defined territory with complex internal boundaries and divisions. The loose definition of this territory is necessary as it is possible to stray into the realm of creativity without consciously being aware of transgressing its borders; for instance, many who write about design are never completely clear if they are talking about creativity or not. Furthermore, once within the borders of creativity, the internal boundaries and divisions, the lines of demarcation and definition, become more tangible. Each of these boundaries has been traced by generations of explorers— previous scholars attempting to make sense of the topography of creativity—while trying to chart a safe passage across its more treacherous plains. Some of the boundaries

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encountered in this voyage are old, and somewhat faintly marked, but they still record an indelible division between groups of people. One example of this is found near a small fissure that separates a tribe of romantics from a nation of rationalists. The former are scattered across the land, each working in isolation to seek out an elusive muse, or be reborn under a propitious star; and in this way become truly creative. On the other side of the divide, groups of people are learning their creative crafts through careful, controlled and rigorous testing and evaluation. They believe that with each step they have the potential to develop higher and more sustained levels of creativity. An even older boundary paradoxically separates creative people from a realm of experts in creativity. Despite their proximity, the former—creative designers and artists— seem uninterested in, or unaware of, the experts in creativity, and there is a strange unwillingness to accept that people might exist in both spaces at once. While further boundaries can be found—some between people and products, and others dividing actions and effects—the goal of the scholar is neither to erase these boundaries, nor to wilfully propose layers of new ones. Conversely, the scholar’s goal is, as Rancière (1995) urges, to develop new knowledge through the act of crossing; through immersion in the field and by celebrating difference. The aim of the present book is to develop a rich, detailed and inclusive picture of the concept of creativity. Rather than attempting to narrow the scope of the work through a process of distinction, and the number of possible readings of its content, the book seeks to capture a sense of the concept of creativity in all of its complex and conflicting dimensions. As the epigraph from Rancière at the start of this chapter suggests, the aim of this work is not necessarily to develop singular definitions, or unravel the ‘knot’ of ideas that currently surround creativity. Rancière (2009: 4) warns in his own writings on creativity that by ‘undoing this knot so that we can better discern [creativity] or aesthetic effects in their singularity, we are thus perhaps fated to missing’ the most important dimensions of the field. However, the book is not without a focus or central theme, even if it seeks to avoid narrow definitions and distinctions. Creativity is primarily discussed in this work in relation to the disciplines of architecture, interior design and industrial design, although contributions from landscape architecture, fine art, science, psychology and anthropology also have an impact on the work. Furthermore, the purpose of this book is not simply to describe the terrain of creativity, but rather to lay the groundwork for a second volume that is focussed on the teaching and assessment of creativity in the architecture and design disciplines.

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Indeed, the catalyst for the present book is the growing realisation that the assessment of creative works is one of the most contentious issues facing contemporary educators. In architecture and design, Schön (1985, 1987) recognised this problem in his early studies of formative assessment in studio environments and, since that time, a range of scholars and researchers have been critical of the frameworks used to assess creativity in these fields (e.g. Cuff 1991; Stevens 1998). In a recent study of architectural education in Australasia, Ostwald and Williams (2008a, 2008b) note that the rise of quality assurance mechanisms for teaching and assessment have placed particular pressure on traditional assessment processes. Not only are these processes inappropriate from a quality assurance perspective, but student assessments are now almost always appealable; thus assessment protocols must conform to legal as well as managerial expectations. Regardless of whether these changes in educational culture are reasonable or not, the fact remains that there is increasing pressure on teaching and assessment processes, with the creative component of these processes particularly lacking. It is against this backdrop that the present work, the first of two volumes on creativity in architectural and design education, sets out to inform debate about the extent to which it is possible to identify, support, assess and maintain a creative practice. The content of this book is divided into four broad sections. Part One includes Chapters One and Two. Chapter One summarises dominant theories of creativity, providing both a historical context for the work and outlining several different analytical strategies and definitions. Chapter Two introduces the main approaches to creativity put forward by the contributors to this book. Part Two of the book details these approaches by exhibiting the answers of 39 experts, drawn from academia and practice, to five questions about creativity. The five questions were originally developed by the project leaders (Williams, Ostwald and Askland) in cooperation, and through trials, with the project team: Professor Shane Murray (Monash University), Associate Professor Andrea Mina (RMIT University), Associate Professor Mark Taylor (Queensland University of Technology), Dr Richard Tucker (Deakin University) and Louise Wallis (University of Tasmania). The new material provided by the 39 experts was the subject of a Human Research Ethics approval and review process (H-20101058). The first two questions asked the contributors to define creativity and explain how it is manifest in their own disciplines. Next, they were invited to consider the relationship between creativity and design. Finally, they were asked about identifying and assessing creativity. The majority of these respondents were also invited to attend a symposium on creativity at which point they were able to present their ideas and debate various positions. The content of the symposium was recorded and analysed by

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the authors and it was used to inform the discussion of the contributions contained in this book. It is important to note that only minor changes were made to the original questionnaire responses, typically to have a uniform system of English spelling, referencing and use of standard terms (linked to a glossary). In most cases we have endeavoured to ensure that references in the questionnaire responses are connected to appropriate source materials, but in a few cases this was not possible. In Part Three, after the 39 responses to the five questions are provided, the authors have developed a set of matrices that allow each expert’s response to be categorised in multiple, different and simultaneous ways. The classifications are drawn from a wide range of definitions and descriptions, alternative systems or theories. They offer a multivalent reading of the responses that identifies the extent to which most respond to, or embrace, multiple theories, traditions or pressures. In Part Four of the work, eminent design academic Ken Freidman provides a more detailed meditation on the five questions, drawing out multiple different strands and presenting his own particular viewpoints on creativity. From this description, it is evident that this book does not present a single definition of creativity—an ideal formula describing the relationship between design and creativity, or a simple answer to the problem of assessing creativity. In contrast to the picture presented in other major works on creativity, the book aims to illustrate the diverse viewpoints on creativity that cannot be simply or unitarily categorised.

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Part One

Complexities and Common Themes

Reviewing the Theories:

An Introduction to Creativity

[…] the word creativity has been over-worked. And it is used loosely […] I submit that the time has come for more precision in definition and usage, that only when the field is analyzed and organized—when the listener can be sure he knows what the speaker is talking about—will the pseudo aspect of the subject of creativity disappear. My appeal is that as educators we recognize the importance of continuing our interest in the nature of creativity, that we be appreciative of the spade work that has been done in the decade just past, that we continue to identify the factors associated with the creative process, and above all that we do not throw out the baby with the bath water just because the water is cloudy. Rhodes (1961: 310) The words in the epigraph were written in 1961 by the then recent education graduate Mel Rhodes. Though written almost 40 years ago, his words retain their relevance today: the words ‘creativity’ and ‘creative’ remain loosely used and overused, and what should be ‘reserved to name a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon’ continues to be used to ‘name only one part of a phenomenon’ (Rhodes 1961: 306). As in 1961, contemporary definitions of creativity may not be mutually exclusive but they do overlap and intertwine, perpetuating an intricate web of ideas, opinions, stereotypes, theories and myths. Subsequently, creativity research today represents an extensive and complex field of inquiry, where refined theories and definitions co-exist with confusion and ambiguity. Is creativity the quality of particular products of the outcome of certain processes? Is it the result of unconscious, spontaneous and inert processes, or is it the result of conscious, rational and strategic processes? Is it the result of rigorous problem solving or of play and improvisation? Is it linear or dynamic? Is it the result of a monologue or a dialogue? Is it general or specific? Is it an expression of creation or re-creation? Is it a matter of objectivity or is it subject to interpretation? Is it the result of personal agency or of social dynamics? The list of questions continues to grow

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and there is no simple answer to most of them and, depending on who you ask and the context in which the questions are posed, you may receive different answers to the same question. One of the reasons for the lack of certainty is that most—if not all—people have an opinion about creativity. Moreover, most—if not all—people have a personal experience of being creative or experiencing something that is perceived as being ‘creative’. Hence, creativity is, at least in a limited way, a personal concept that reflects past experiences, knowledge, familiarity, ideas, values, practice and attitudes. Creativity is also emotional; it suggests an affecting, response or transcendent reaction to something—whether or not this something is singularly connected to the self or can be experienced by others. Any affective reaction, such as feelings of surprise, fondness, amusement or disgust, is placed within a framework of particular social, cultural and historical circumstances, subsequently indicating that creativity is also contextual. The personal, emotional and contextual elements of creative experiences are at least partially responsible for the complexity of creativity. The concept of creativity presupposes a layer of opinion, understanding and experience that runs parallel to any theoretical and analytical attempts at explaining the term. In many ways, it can be said that there are two distinct discourses of creativity; namely, one that reflects folk wisdoms and personal experiences, and one that arises from academic discourse and theoretical efforts. These two discourses are not isolated but reflect and influence each other. When trying to explain what creativity is within either of the two, explanations and theories will be constantly juxtaposed with the idea of experiencing creativity. The problem of ambiguity then arises when the subjective field of experiencing creativity blends with the objective discourse of theorising the concept. To be more precise, problems of ambiguity and confusion arise when the idea of creativity is taken for granted and the two discourses cohabit within the same space of practice. One such space where both discourses must interact is in education; the place where students and teachers must not only manifest their experiences of creativity, but they must also articulate them. These experiences and perceptions may, to a varying degree, draw on the theoretical discourse of creativity and the subjective experience of the phenomenon. To avoid ambiguity and create a constructive dialogue between teachers and students, an understanding of perceptions of the concept as they form part of the social field is required. This is also the case with the present book: this book represents a space in which personal and theoretical ideas, perceptions and theories about creativity are presented, juxtaposed and occasionally challenged. It represents a space in which the

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reader’s, the authors’ and the contributors’ ideas of creativity meet. Thus, it needs to be clarified if, when speaking about ‘creativity’, we are making reference to a philosophical concept, an empirical phenomenon, the trait of a process, a product, a person or a situation. This introductory chapter seeks to clarify this by summarising the dominant approaches and theories that exist and by providing a historical and analytical context for the book. The chapter will not provide a detailed account of all theories of creativity, but rather present a brief introduction to the main approaches, including the historical models of romanticism and rationalism, the individualist psychoanalytical, humanistic, associative, factorial, cognitive-developmental, and cognitive approaches, and the contextualist confluence approach. Moreover, the chapter will discuss how creativity is approached within the broader design literature, providing a disciplinary context for the subsequent chapters.

Historical models of creativity: romanticism and rationalism One of the questions posed in this book is ‘what is creativity’? This is a very broad and generic question to which similarly broad and generic answers might be expected. In contrast to the answers presented in Part Two of the book, which are all detailed and considered, it could be expected that answers to the question would be along the lines of ‘something original and new’; ‘something different and unusual’; ‘something produced by someone exceptional’; ‘a piece of art’; ‘something beautiful’; ‘a quality of artists, poets, musicians and other “creative people”’; ‘something that just happens’; and so on. Such answers reflect what R. Keith Sawyer, Professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St Lewis, labels ‘creativity myths’. He explains that these myths ‘are so widely believed that they sometimes seem obvious, common sense’ (Sawyer 2006: 18). The myths often conflict the science of creativity, reflect personal and cultural conceptions, and simplify complex issues. According to Sawyer (2006: 18–27), the creativity myths include the ideas that creativity comes from the unconscious; that children are more creative than adults; that creativity represents the inner spirit of the individual; that it is a form of therapeutic self-discovery; that it is spontaneous inspiration; that many creative works go unrecognised in their own time and will only be acknowledged in the future; that everyone is creative; that creativity and originality are the same; and that the fine arts are more creative than crafts. The creativity myths reflect what is often referred to as the ‘romantic’ model of creativity. The romantic model, also known as the ‘inspirational’ or ‘mystical’ model, refers to the belief that ‘creativity bubbles up from an irrational unconscious, and that rational deliberation interferes with the creative process’; it assumes ‘a regression to a

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state of consciousness characterized by emotion and instinct, a fusion between self and world, and freedom from rationality and convention’ (Sawyer 2006: 15). Romanticism can be traced back to ancient Greece and, more specifically, to the writings of Plato (429–347BCE). Plato argued that creativity is the result of divine inspiration and that rational deliberation interferes with creative processes (Sawyer 2006: 15). Creativity then, as divine inspiration, is a process of undisciplined, ‘agonised’, searching (musing). According to Plato, an artist could only create what his (or her) Muse dictated and, as Sawyer (2006: 12) explains, ‘[t]he artist’s job was not to imitate nature but rather to reveal the sacred and transcendent qualities of nature. Art could only be a pale imitation of the perfection of the world of ideas.’ A later version of the romantic model is embedded in the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) theory of aesthetics. In the Kantian notion of creativity, the creative individual is seen as someone who possesses ‘an extraordinary innate “gift” that is beyond the grasp of mere mortals’ (Cowdroy & Williams 2006: 100). This idea of ‘gifted individuals’ parallels and sustains Plato’s view of creativity as an innate (or divine) force that cannot be promoted or fostered; it emphasises creativity as something that lies beyond the rational conscious. The romantic model is contrasted by a ‘rationalist’ paradigm, which maintains that creativity is ‘generated by the conscious, deliberating, intelligent, rational mind’ (Sawyer 2006: 15). Similarly to romanticism, rationalism can also be traced back to ancient Greece. It was first proposed by Plato’s student, Aristotle (384–322BCE), who emphasised that conscious work, rationality and deliberation are required in order to realise creative aspirations. In Aristotle’s view, creativity was potentially more commonplace and it included the creation of uncomplicated or predictable objects as acts of creation. It was, however, not until the European Renaissance that the rationalist model started posing a serious challenge to the romantic idea of special talent or unusual ability as manifestations of an outside spirit. The Renaissance valued reason above all, and the emerging rationalist model of creativity emphasised reason, knowledge, training and education as essential elements of creativity. An important change embedded in the rationalist model is the transferral of creative ownership from an external source to the individual ‘actor’. With rationalism, creative potential and creative agency became an attribute of the artist him/her self; rather than artists and artisans having a genius, as suggested by romanticism, creative agents were now seen as being geniuses. Nevertheless, it was not until the end of the 18th century that the discussion of creative ownership fell upon four generally accepted distinctions, which; (a) separate the genius and the supernatural, (b) perceive genius as potential in all human beings, (c) distinguish between genius and talent, and (d) acknowledge the

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role of the political (and socio-cultural) context upon the potential and exercise of a genius. These four distinctions have, as Albert and Runco (1999: 22) assert, ‘become the bedrock of our present-day ideas about creativity’. Thus creativity is now commonly seen as a potential in all human beings that can be fostered, developed and promoted. Nonetheless, despite this general consensus, romantic ideas about individual genius, as a mystical force and spontaneous inspiration, continue to colour the debate about creativity, in conventional discussions and in popular scientific writings. Bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert (2009), refers to the notions of mystique and spontaneity when talking about creativity and questions the causes of the anxiety that often surrounds the creative process. Gilbert (2009) argues that there is a collective acceptance of the idea that creativity and suffering are inherently linked. Trying to come to terms with the suffering and anxiety embedded in the creative process, Gilbert returns to ancient Greece and Rome, and suggests that romantic ideas about a muse, daemon or genius may provide a psychological construct to protect the individual artist from the pressures on performing creatively. She recounts a meeting with the American poet Ruth Stone who told her how, as a young woman, she would be working in the fields when she would ‘feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape […] as a thunderous train of air’ (Gilbert 2009). When she felt it coming—it ‘would shake the earth under her feet’—she knew she had to run to the house to get to a pen and paper fast enough so that when the poem ‘thundered through her’ she would be able to collect it and write it down. If she failed to get there in time, the poem would ‘barrel through her, and she would miss it and […] “it would continue on across the landscape looking”, as she put it, “for another poet”’ (Gilbert 2009). This does not suggest that Gilbert rejects the need for hard work and conscious thought. Indeed, when describing her own creative process she uses the metaphor of a mule that gets the result through continuous hard work. However, her dilemma, and perhaps one of the causes for the continuous renaissance of the romantic concept, is that as part of her creative process, there is, despite the dominance of discipline, rational deliberation and hard work, an element of something inexplicable. As Gilbert explains, ‘even I in my mulishness […] have had works or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify’ (Gilbert 2009). Gilbert rhetorically asks what this inexplicable element may be, but this tantalising lead soon dries up. Gilbert’s talk, as well as other popular scientific contributions and conventional discourse more generally, points toward a view of creativity as being restricted to complex, groundbreaking and innovative work that is historically influential—it is the very complexity of the work or the pioneering character of the original idea that

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makes it creative. Whereas popular scientific and conventional discussion tend to explain such high-level ideas or work in relation to the romantic ideas of spontaneity and mystique, academic discussions often separate between progressive stages of creativity that can be distinguished by the level of high-order thinking and imagination involved (e.g. Ainsworth-Land 1982; Bergquist 1998; Cowdroy & de Graaff 2005; Glăveanu 2010). As such, creative agency and potential are placed upon and within the individual actor(s). However, what is this creative agency and creative potential? How is it expressed and promoted? These questions form part of the scientific enquiries into the phenomenon of creativity, which will be explored further in the next section.

Scientific models of creativity Scientific interest in creativity is relatively recent considering the long history of the concept and its place in human society and culture. Until the middle of the 20th century, only a small number of professional articles and books were devoted to the question of creativity (see Guilford 1950: 445). The issue of creativity was addressed in influential branches of psychology, including psychoanalysis and behaviouralism during the first half of the 20th century. However, the study of creativity in its own right was limited up until the latter half of the century when increased scientific interest in the phenomenon saw the emergence of what has been labelled ‘creativity studies’. Scientific explanations of creativity generally agree that creativity is about hard, mostly conscious, work and everyday mental processes. Analysis of the phenomenon includes consideration of personal and intrapersonal variables, cognitive schemas and mental structures, as well as cultural, social, political and economic circumstances. Creativity research has evolved into a highly complex and contested field with a vast range of theories, in themselves of an intricate and compound nature. To illustrate the analytical and theoretical complexity of the field, this section will outline some of the main scientific approaches to the concept. This is a brief overview that does not go into any of the theories in detail, but instead provides a sketch of important theories that have influenced contemporary approaches to creativity in different ways. Moreover, it illustrates how rationalist and romantic elements intertwine within the scientific discourse; that is, though these theories are generally of a rationalist nature, romantic elements can affect the scientific explanations. An example of the presence of romanticism within the scientific domain is found in the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and in his emphasis on creativity as the result of unconscious, primary processes. Freud’s psychoanalytical

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approach to creativity is one of the few approaches that restrict creativity to a few non-science professions, subsequently removing creativity from the more general population. His approach rests upon the idea that creativity rises from the tensions between conscious reality and unconscious drives. Freud viewed human beings as an organism motivated by unconscious sexual and aggressive impulses. According to Freud, it is these unconscious drives that are the source of creativity; that is, creativity is a by-product of primary processes. In Freud’s view, daydreams and fantasies are integral to the creative process, these resting largely on unsatisfied wishes. Bloomberg (1973: 2) explains that according to Freud’s theoretical framework, creativity is ‘a behavioural manifestation of the defense mechanism of sublimation, the unconscious process through which the individual directs his sexual or aggressive energies into culturally approved behaviours.’ The psychoanalytical approach to creativity can be categorised as an individualist approach. This refers to predominantly psychological theories of creativity that consider the creative potential of individuals. In conjunction with psychoanalysis, it includes the humanistic, associative, factorial, cognitive-developmental and cognitive approaches to creativity. In contrast to Freud’s psychoanalytical approach, the other individualist approaches do not restrict creativity to a particular group of individuals, but instead bestows it as a human potential. The humanist approach, for example, argues that creativity is part of human nature and that it infuses all of human life and is essential to growth, to individual learning and adaptation, and to an inner sense of self (Bergquist 1998). Abraham Maslow’s theory of the psychology of being (1999 [1968]) forms part of the humanist approach to creativity. Maslow (1999 [1968]) separates three categories of creativity which each refer to different levels of consciousness: first, primary/Dionysian creativity stems from unconscious, natural and spontaneous processes; second, secondary/Apollonian creativity stems from conscious thought processes, including analysis, discipline and hard work; and, third, integrated creativity reaches beyond the spheres of artistic and scientific creativity and characterises the lives of self-actualised individuals. According to the humanistic approach, actualisation of creative potential is dependent on the social environment of the individual and, as Bloomberg (1973: 5) explains, creativity can only thrive in a ‘social climate free from pressures from conformity and of stern evaluation’. The idea of conscious thought processes as present in Maslow’s Dionysian creativity is further developed in the associative approach represented by Sarnoff A. Mednick (1962). Bloomberg (1973: 9) summarises the associative approach as a model that

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‘regards creativity as the process of combining mutually distant associative elements of thought’. Creative thinking is defined as: the forming of associative elements into new combinations which either meet specific requirements or are in some way useful. The more mutually remote the elements of the new combination, the more creative the process or solution (Mednick 1962: 221). This draws attention towards the ideas of divergent and convergent thinking; a conceptual pair that is today often used when describing creative thought processes. The distinction between convergent and divergent thinking is often associated with Joy Paul Guilford, whose factorial approach to creativity remain influential, particularly within educational contexts. Guilford (1950: 444) defines creativity in its most narrow sense as ‘the abilities that are most characteristic of creative people.’ Creative abilities, he continues, are the capacity ‘to exhibit creative behaviour to a noteworthy degree’ (Guilford 1950: 444), which further depends upon motivational and temperamental traits. Accordingly, comprehending creativity requires an understanding of the creative personality; that is,‘the unique pattern of traits’ (Guilford 1950: 444) held by the creative individual which is manifest in creative behaviour. This suggests that creativity is an aspect of personality. It is a characteristic shared by all humans and ‘[c]reative acts can … be expected, no matter how feeble or how infrequent, of almost all individuals’ (Guilford 1950: 446). Creativity involves issues of motivation, aptitude and temperament as well as the interaction and interconnections between these three aspects (Guilford 1973 [1965]: 229–30). Moreover, it depends upon previous experience or facts; as Guilford states (1950: 448) ‘[n]o creative person can get along without previous experiences or facts; he never creates in a vacuum or with a vacuum.’ Guilford’s analytical framework is based upon the observation that rather than constituting a single ability, creativity is made up of a number of abilities. Variations of patterns of primary abilities that lead to creative efforts lead to different ‘types’ of creativity or creative divergence. This idea brings the discussion to yet another individualist approach; namely, the cognitivedevelopmental approach drawn from cognitive-developmental psychology. Cognitive-developmental psychology focuses on psychological changes in development. It is often associated with Jean Piaget (1973, 1977) whose theory has implications on the teaching of creativity in particular. The cognitive-developmental approach to creativity reflects Piaget’s theoretical framework, proposing that creative abilities move through a number of developmental stages (Parsons 1986). Heinz Werner (1957) argues that cognitive development follows ‘an invariant orthogenetic principle

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of increasing differentiation and hierarchic integration’ (Bloomberg 1973: 16). The concept of hierarchic integration, a requirement for creative behaviour, refers to the synthesis and simultaneous use of developmental levels of functioning, which are ordinarily antagonistic to one another. As the individual matures, the individual develops relatively enduring strategies for processing information called ‘cognitive styles’. An example of a cognitive style is ‘field dependency’, which, as Bloomberg (1973: 17) argues, ‘is essential in creativity’ as ‘creativity seemingly requires an analytic orientation in order to clarify, classify and define the details of a problem’. Thus, the cognitivedevelopmental approach explores creativity as an event through a stage-ordered model of development and, as such, remains entangled in a discussion of personal traits that facilitate creative behaviour. In contrast, the cognitive approach considers the process of creative thinking; it seeks to understand the mental representations and processes that underpin creative thought. An example of a cognitive theory of creativity is Finke, Ward and Smith’s (1992) Geneplore model which identifies two main processing phases in creative thought: a generative phase and an exploratory phase. The former phase includes the construction of mental representations labelled ‘preinventive structures’, which have properties that promote creative discoveries. These properties are utilised in the latter phase to promote creative ideas. The two phases of creative invention reflect a number of mental processes, including retrieval, association, synthesis, transformation, analogical transfer, and categorical reduction (Albert & Runco 1999: 7-8). Another example of a cognitive approach to creativity is Cowdroy and Williams’ (2006) three-step model of creative thinking. Cowdroy and Williams (2006) argue that there are three ‘agreed’ types of creative ability, each representing a progressive stage in the movement from initial idea to realised work. The three hierarchical stages are conceptualisation, schematisation and actualisation, each of which require a particular type of memory (emotional, declarative and procedural) and thinking skills (imaginative, originality; recollection, orientation, extrapolation, planning, innovation, inventiveness; and, development of abilities to accommodate innovations and inventions). Whereas some of the individualist approaches outlined above offer suggestions and hints about environmental factors, they do not explore the question of environment or context for creativity in any systematic fashion; the focus of these approaches is, ultimately, the individual. During the 1980s, a group of psychologists turned to other social sciences such as sociology, anthropology and history with the aim of expanding the notion of creativity to include other dimensions. The emerging contextualist approaches to creativity moved beyond the psychological emphasis on the individual

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and considered how creativity, creative abilities, creative processes and creative products, reflect an interactive engagement between the individual and the social environment. There was an increased emphasis on creativity as, in the words of Jonathan Plucker and Ronald A. Beghetto (2004: 156), ‘the interplay between ability and process by which an individual or group produces an outcome or product that is both novel and useful as defined within some social context’. The emerging contextualist approaches, often categorised as confluence approaches, moved beyond a focus on cognitive elements and acknowledged the role of the individual as a social being, acting within, and in response to, particular milieus. In one sense Jacques Rancière can be considered a confluence thinker, though he is primarily interested in the politics of creativity. For Rancière (2004, 2009) the question of creativity is largely irrelevant without an analysis of the potential of the person, object or situation, to escape the expected or anticipated role of the person, object of situation. That is, creativity is relative to the capacity to transcend and then, most importantly, alter contemporary expectations or values. There is a vast array of studies that reflect this idea and that reveal both implicit and explicit theories that combine cognitive, personal, motivational and socio-cultural elements (e.g. Albert & Runco 1993; Gardner 1993; Glăveanu 2010; Gruber 1989; Lubart 1994; Mumford & Gustafson 1988; Perkins 1981; Sternberg 1985a, 1985b, 2003, 2006; Weisberg 1993; Woodman & Schoenfeldt 1989). Only three of the most influential theories will be considered here. These are Teresa Amabile’s theory of the social psychology of creativity (1983, 1996), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s system theory (1988, 1996, 1999) and Robert J Sternberg and Todd I Lubart’s investment theory of creativity (1991, 1992, 1995, 1996). These three theories all present contextualised, constructive and comprehensive definitions of creativity that embrace the creative actor, the creative process, the creative outcome and the creative environment. Amabile’s (1983; 1996) theory of social psychology is founded on the idea of creativity as the convergence of intrinsic motivation, knowledge and abilities, and skills (including cognitive style). She puts forward both a consensual (operational) definition and a conceptual definition of creativity. Her consensual definition focuses on the creative product, claiming that: a creative product or response is creative to the extent that appropriate observers independently agree it is creative. Appropriate observers are those familiar with the domain in which the product was created or the response articulated. Thus, creativity can be regarded as the quality of products or

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responses judged to be creative by appropriate observers, and it can also be regarded as the process by which something so judged is produced (Amabile 1996: 33). In order to move this position towards a more theoretical framework of creativity, Amabile also proposes a conceptual definition of creativity stating that a ‘product or response will be judged as creative to the extent that (a) it is both a novel and appropriate, useful, correct or valuable response to the task at hand, and (b) the task is heuristic rather than algorithmic’ (Amabile 1996: 35). The role of judgement by significant others is also identified by Csikszentmihalyi (1999: 314) who argues that: [i]f creativity is to retain a useful meaning, it must refer to a process that results in an idea or product that is recognized and adopted by others. Originality, freshness of perception, divergent-thinking ability are all well and good in their own right, as desirable personal traits. But without some form of public recognition they do not constitute creativity (Csikszentmihalyi 1999: 314). Creativity is a phenomenon constructed through the interaction between producer and audience—that is, creativity is the product of ‘social systems making judgements about individuals’ products’ (Csikszentimihalyi 1999: 314). Central to this theory are the concepts of domain (the cultural, or symbolic aspect) and field (the social aspect); creativity as a product occurs ‘at the intersection where individuals, domains, and fields interact’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1999: 314). The relationship between the creative agent(s) and the environment is also emphasised by Sternberg and Lubart (1991, 1992, 1995, 1996). Their investment theory concerns ‘the decision to be creative’ whereby creativity is conceived in relation to decisionmaking processes (Sternberg 2003). According to this scheme, creativity requires a combination of six distinct but interrelated resources: intellectual abilities, knowledge, styles of thinking, personality, motivation, and environment. They hypothesise that creativity involves ‘more than a simple sum of a person’s level on each component’ (Sternberg 2006: 90). Indeed, they propose three key elements that may have an impact on overall creativity: firstly, in relation to knowledge, there may be a threshold below which creativity is not possible; secondly, in relation to motivation and environment, strong motivation may counteract or compensate for weakness in environment; thirdly, in relation to intelligence and motivation, interactions may occur ‘in which high levels on both components could multiplicatively enhance creativity’ (Sternberg 2006: 90).

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Three intellectual abilities are of particular importance here, namely the synthetic ability to see problems in new ways and escape conventional thinking patterns; the analytic ability to recognise which ideas are worthwhile; and the practical-contextual ability to know how to persuade others of the value of ones ideas (Sternberg 1985a). However, such skills are not enough; creativity requires the decision to use these skills. The notion of decision allows for divergence in creativity as a result of individual actions, not simply as a result of contextual factors. As Sternberg (2006: 95) explains: ‘[c]reative contributors make different decisions regarding how they express their creativity.’ Subsequently, ‘creativity can be of different kinds, depending on how it propels existing ideas forward. When developing creativity, we can develop different kinds of creativity, ranging from minor replications to major redirections in thinking’ (Sternberg 2006: 95). Moreover, creative contributions can differ in quality, not simply quantity, and the type of creativity can be at least as powerful as the scale of the work. This argument rests largely upon the importance of context and it is illustrated in the difference between creative discovery and re-discovery. Summarising the essence of investment theory, Sternberg (2006: 95-6) argues that: [a] creative contribution represents an attempt to propel a field from wherever it is to wherever the creator believes the field should go. Thus, creativity is, but its nature, propulsion. It moves a field from some point to another. It also always represents a decision to exercise leadership. The creator tries to bring others to a particular point in the multidimensional creative space. The attempt may or may not succeed. This propulsion model leads to three major categories of contributions that can be considered creative. First, there are contributions that accept current paradigms. These include replication, redefinition, forward incrementation and advance forward incrementation. Second, there are contributions that reject current paradigms and try to replace them. These include redirection, reconstruction and reinitiation. Third, there are contributions that synthesise current paradigms or that try to integrate multiple current paradigms. The fundamental premise for Sternberg and Lubart’s theory is that ‘creativity is in large part a decision that anyone can make but that few people actually do make because they find the costs to be too high’ (Sternberg 2006: 97). Though some may find the economic metaphor problematic, the theoretical framework that they propose is useful in that it acknowledges aspects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, individual agency and social dynamics, historical positioning and socio-cultural context, and qualitative

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and quantitative divergence. Moreover, it allows for recognition of creativity at different levels and scales, making space for both psychological creativity—contributions that have a creative value to the person him/her self—and historical creativity— contributions that change historical paradigms (Boden 2004: 2). Therefore, the investment theory recognises creativity on a personal level and allows personal, interpersonal and societal growth, development and progression. The study of creativity has come a long way in the last 50 years and definitions such as those outlined above have been widely practiced, produced and propagated. In recent years, purely individualist approaches have been commonly rejected and a new generation of concepts that emphasise context and the interconnectedness of elements dominate contemporary discourse. Yet, it is important to retain an awareness of alternative theories such as the individualist and romantic approaches, as these often exert an ongoing influence on folk perceptions and conventional ideas about creativity, despite current scientific evidence. Moreover, contemporary scientific approaches are not isolated from those of the past; these theories draw on or are a reaction to past endeavours, as are the creative contributions they try to explain. The current discourse on creativity reflects the contemporary emphasis and valuation of creativity as a currency. Contemporary society and modern cultures embrace creativity as it is presented in cultural progression and technological advancement. Creativity is perceived as being both a tool for production, learning and success, as well as a desired societal outcome. Subsequently, there is an increased interest in how to foster, promote and develop creativity. The confluence approaches to creativity can, in many ways, be seen as a reflection of this; an expansion of the concept from it being simply a cognitive ability—unconscious or conscious—to the positioning of agency both on the creative agent and on the society in which he or she acts. One of the first ‘confluence theorists’ was Mel Rhodes. In the 1961 article, An analysis of creativity, he defines the word creativity as: a noun naming the phenomenon in which a person communicates a new concept (which is the product). Mental activity (or mental process) is implicit in the definition, and of course no one could conceive of a person living or operating in a vacuum so the term press is also implicit (Rhodes 1961: 305). As he explains, each strand (person, product, process and press) ‘has a unique identity academically, but only in unity do the four strands operate functionally’ (Rhodes 1961: 307). Rhodes (1961: 307) argues that it is ‘the fact of synthesis’ that causes much of the ambiguity and complexity in discussions of creativity. The synthesis creates diffusion

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and abstraction; yet it is this very complexity that allows us to explore and comprehend the divergence that exists in creativity—in terms of expression, scale, judgement and ability. In what follows, we will use Rhodes’ categorical scheme to identify the various approaches to creativity that exist within the many, often convoluted, approaches to creativity in design literature. By distinguishing the four categories of person, product, process and press, we aim to illustrate the complexity of the concept in relation to design, yet make it more accessible through the identification of its various parts.

Approaches to creativity in design The verb‘to design’ does not necessarily imply the production of something new—indeed, it may simply refer to an act that follows routine procedures and only re-creates existing patterns. Similarly, the noun ‘design’ does not necessarily make reference to something new, different or unusual—it may refer to traditional patterns, conventional models or customary acts. Nonetheless, the word ‘design’ is often associated with creativity and innovation, and it is assumed that design practitioners and design processes strive to arrive at something that can contribute to technological advancement and cultural enhancement; that is, design is often defined as the production of ideas and outcomes (not simply the re-production of such) and the generation of solutions to wicked problems previously unsolved. Indeed, the common definition of design problems as ‘wicked’ or ‘ill-defined’ implies the importance of creativity to design; these problems require a particular (creative) approach in order for them to be solved. This underlying definition of design problems —as problems requiring creativity—has consequences for how creativity is approached in the design literature. Indeed, Casakin (2007: 22) argues that ‘the exploration of unfamiliar and unconventional design solutions requires creative skills […] Creativity enables the talented designer to transcend conventional knowledge domain[s] so as to investigate new ideas and concepts which may lead to innovative solutions’; it effectively supports the designer ‘to perceive a problem from unorthodox and innovative perspectives’ (Casakin 2007: 21). In comparison to the widely recognised importance of creativity to design, creativity as a phenomenon remains relatively under-researched in the design domain. There is no established ‘study of design creativity’ that explores the particularities of creativity as it relates to design. Indeed, creativity often appears as a taken for granted element of the design process and the two are not always clearly separated. This leads to questions such as: is the creative process part of elements of the design process or is it equal to the design process? Is creative design a noun describing the end-product or is it a description of the process? This section considers the perceptions of creativity

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embedded in the design literature. To illustrate the diversity of approaches that exist within design literature, the discussion is structured according to Rhodes’ categorical scheme of the 4Ps: (1) studies that emphasise behavioural aspects and that include empirical and sub-empirical referents such as ideas (initial, critical, composite), idea generation, creative leap, use of technology, restructuring and combining, and social and physical environment (process); (2) studies that consider personal characteristics such as personality variables, intelligence, values, personal attributes, intrinsic motivation, expertise and skills (person); (3) studies that focus on the outcomes of the creative process, often classifying products according to a list of properties indicating their creative value (product); and, (4) studies that refer to ‘the relationship of human beings and their environment’ (Rhodes 1961: 308), analysing the general influences that ‘operate through implicit valuation and tradition (as would be the case of cultural, organizational, or familial presses) or more specific [influences] (as would be the case in interpersonal exchanges or environmental settings)’ (Runco 2004: 662) (press).

Creativity and the Design Process In general, it is possible to differentiate between those people who describe the design process as a descriptive, linear model (e.g. Archer 1965; French 1985; Howard et al. 2008), and those who depict the design process as an integrative system through which problems and solutions, sub-problems and sub-solutions co-evolve (e.g. Akin & Akin 1996; Cross 2000; Demirkan & Hasirci 2009; Hasirci & Demirkan 2007; Hertz 1992; Korth 2000). The descriptive models ‘usually identify the significance of generating a solution concept early in the process, thus reflecting the solution-focused nature of design thinking’ (Cross 2000: 29). This emphasis on the final solution has been criticised because of its unidirectional nature, its lack of flexibility and potential disregard for factors that become evident during the process. Logan and Smithers (1993), for example, argue that such models fail to address the fundamental objective of the design process; namely ‘understanding the structure of the problem (rather than the solution), and analysing the interrelationships between criteria to gain some insight into the relationships between each individual design decision and all of the other decisions that together define the solution’ (Logan & Smithers 1993: 144). The difference between the descriptive, linear models and the integrated models is encapsulated in the distinction between routine and nonroutine design processes (Gero & Maher 1993). For the purpose of clarification, it should be noted that the notion of routine and nonroutine design can be applied to both the design process and the design product, though it is the former that is the focus of this discussion. Routine designs are

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those ‘that are recognized as not being different from previously produced designs in their class in any substantive way’ (Gero & Maher 1993: 2); that is, as Rosenman and Gero (1993: 113) explain, ‘design which proceeds within a well-defined state space […] [where] all the design variables and their possible range are known and the problem is one of instantiation.’ In such circumstances, the process is predictable and the design evolves through pre-defined stages in a linear fashion. In contrast, nonroutine designs are those ‘that are recognized as being different from previously produced designs in their class in some substantive sense’ (Gero & Maher 1993: 2). At least one function, structure or mapping will be unknown at the start of the design project. The ill-defined nature of such a design suggests that stability and monotonicity is problematic and that new elements, operators, requirements, structures and potential solutions are introduced throughout the process. In the design literature, nonroutine design is further divided into innovative and creative design. Innovative design results in products or processes that display solutions that were not previously known, though the difference is due to change in the values of existing design variables. Creative design may incorporate innovative design but it involves a substantial difference due to the introduction of at least one new design variable. Therefore, in contrast to routine and innovative design, which involves generation of new/alternative subtypes, creative design generates entirely new types (Gero & Maher 1993; Rosenman & Gero 1993). In their discussion about design prototype schemas, Roseman and Gero (1993: 122) argue that it is impossible to initiate a creative process from nothing; stating that any ‘new structure must be produced from some starting point or foundation.’ They contend that there are two basic approaches to creative design: it is possible to (a) ‘start from existing elements either in the domain or outside it and modify them to produce elements that did not exist before’; or (b) ‘configure the new elements from basic “building blocks”’ (Rosenman & Gero 1993: 122). The first approach includes design by combination, design by analogy and design by mutation, whilst the second approach refers to design from first principles. As is often the case, Roseman and Gero’s scheme does not say anything about creativity or the creative process as such, but rather presents different methodologies that may support the designer in the development of creative products. Within their scheme, the creative process is essentially reduced to problem solving, though they expand it from a process of searching for solutions to a problem, to a process that involves exploration (i.e. finding new goals, states, and state transition processes). Similarly, Logan and Smithers (1993: 141) argue that ‘design is the activity of “solving” design problems’. It involves ‘the modification of both the

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problem goals (the design requirements) and the means available to achieve these goals (the design knowledge)’ (Logan & Smithers 1993: 141). The defining characteristic of design processes, however, is ‘that they are not amendable to purely search-based problem solving techniques’ (Logan & Smithers 1993: 141). There is a wide variety in complexity and scope, and the fundamental problem in any design task is how to generate (as opposed to select) a solution. Accordingly, design processes must be identified from the kinds of problems they attempt to solve and any a priori decision about the nature of the design process must be avoided (Logan & Smithers 1993: 142).

Creativity and the Designer (Person) As previously suggested, discussions about the creative process often result in definitions based upon the problems that the process addresses. Similarly, many studies of successful designers return to the question of the ill-structured nature of the design problem, emphasising the need for particular characteristics and skills when dealing with design problems. When seen in isolation, the emphasis on personal variables reflects the romantic model of creativity and suggests that only selected individuals with particular design skills will be able to engage with the complexities of design problems. Indeed, as Heath (1991) argues, designers and architects still cling to the romantic model of creativity not because they believe it, but because it serves to differentiate what designers do from what engineers do, or from what the general public can do. The design literature that explicitly deals with personal variables does, however, reflect the rationalist paradigm in their portrayal of a reflexive and dynamic dialogue between the designer and the problem. Cross (2000), for example, highlights the importance of intuition; of being able to work at different levels of abstraction at the same time, and of sketching and drawing skills to enable a conceptual thinking process based upon the development of ideas through external expressions. The emphasis on representational skills suggests a rational process that incorporates reflection and feedback, subsequently indicating the important role of individual communication and analytical skills in design. The role of two- and three-dimensional representational skills (using drawing, sketching, clay and other modelling tools) as a vehicle for creative design has also been emphasised by Mitchell (1993), Hasirci and Demirkan (2007), Milton and Hughes (2005), and Yamacli, Ozen and Tokman (2006). An issue of creativity research that has gained significant attention both within and beyond the field of design relates to the question of how intelligence and creativity are related. Gero and Maher (1993: 4) state that creativity ‘is rarely the result of naivety, but rather it results from the ability of a highly intelligent person to put different ideas

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together and recognise their value.’ The correlation between creativity and intelligence is also identified by Lawson (1990) who, in his efforts to demystify the design process, contends that creativity requires both divergent and convergent thinking. One of the major challenges of design, he argues, is the very balance of divergent and convergent thinking needed to produce a creative design. The requirement of divergent and convergent thinking skills is embedded in the common perception of design creativity as the development of ideas or work that are novel, useful and appropriate; whilst novelty requires divergent thinking, usefulness and/or appropriateness requires convergent thinking and knowledge of the field and domain in which the creation takes place. Another dimension of the creativity debate, which is associated with the idea of the creative person, relates to the question of pre-existing knowledge and knowledge structures. In their discussion about the use of design prototypes, Rosenman and Gero (1993: 115) argue that ‘[c]reative design deals with the formulation of new structure, that is, new vocabulary elements or new configurations of existing vocabulary elements in response to either existing or new functional requirements.’ The notion of recreation embedded in this perception of creative design is the foundation of their model for creative design based on design prototypes; that is, generalisations of design elements that provide a framework for storing design experience and information about functional, behavioural, and structural elements. Rosenman and Gero suggest the use of an external knowledge base in design. Though this does not encapsulate the knowledge and experience of the designer, it reflects the paramount role of knowledge and experience in design. They argue that the ‘creative leap’, the moment of inspiration and divergent thinking on which the creative process depends, ‘can only be achieved by recourse to prior experience’ (Rosenman & Gero 1993: 135). The notion of the existence of idealised, previously experienced prototypes in design, has been criticised by authors such as Logan and Smithers (1993). However, their critique is not about the emphasis on pre-existing knowledge and the role of experience, but the view of the design process as a series of transformations that are governed by a set of rules or codes and the use of an organised body of a priori knowledge. In contrast to Rosenman and Gero, they contend that the unique nature of a design problem suggests that schemata and strategies must be developed in the context of the current design problem rather than those of the past (Logan & Smithers 1993).

Creativity and the Design Product The notion of design prototypes, as it is developed by Roseman and Gero (1993), ultimately connects the creative person’s knowledge and experience, as well as the

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creative process, back to the design product; relating particular products to existing knowledge structures and experience from which future creativity and design evolve. Rosenman and Gero (1993: 111-2) define creative products as any product that ‘exhibits the properties of being novel, having value and/ or having richness of interpretations’. They argue that ‘[d]esign requires that the form of an artefact, or more precisely, a description of structure of an artefact, be produced’ (Rosenman & Gero 1993: 112), subsequently separating creative design from creative thinking. Design, they propose, is a cognitive activity that employs creative thinking (Rosenman & Gero 1993: 112), but creative thinking does not translate to creative design unless a new structure is created. In another publication co-authored with Maher, Gero argues that a design product can be evaluated as creative if it is novel, has utility and value (Gero & Maher 1993). Novelty and appropriateness rise from the fact that design is a purposeful act, and value is therefore the important distinguishing criterion in the evaluation of creativity in design. They propose two factors that measure value: transformation and concentration. Transformation refers to the power of a product to transform the constraints of reality through combination of ‘elements in ways that defy tradition and yield a new perspective […] These products involve a transformation of materials or ideas to overcome conventional constraints’ (Gero & Maher 1993: 3). Concentration, on the other hand, refers to products ‘that warrant close and repeated examinations […] [that] offer something new each time we experience them […] They have about them an intensity and concentration of meaning requiring continued contemplation.’ The implications of Gero’s and Maher’s scheme are that the creative qualities of a product can only be evaluated after it has been produced. Similarly, McLaughlin (1993: 44) argues that the requirement of originality ‘imposes a constraint that the value embodied in the product cannot be fully stated at the outset of the process of developing that product.’ She refers to the value that presents itself through the creative design process as ‘emergent value’. Emergent value is dependent on, but not identical to, existing knowledge, and the recognition of emergent value is ‘a function of the construction of a distinct set of relations between aspects of existing knowledge, facilitated by the presentation of a creative product’ (McLaughlin 1993: 54). Any classification of either a person or a product as creative, she argues, ‘must start with a classification of product’ (McLaughlin 1993: 52); ‘a necessary condition of any process that can in itself be called creative is selection based on recognition of emergent value’ (McLaughlin 1993: 76). An important characteristic with emergent value is that it is relative rather than absolute; the basis for evaluation varies across individuals, societies and time (McLaughlin 1993). Reflecting Csikszentmihalyi’s system theoretical

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approach outlined above, this argument posits creative products as something that are socially defined, subsequently acknowledging the role of the field and domain in which creativity occurs. However, as will be shown hereafter, the social field and domain does not just play a role in evaluation or judgement of creative products, they can also affect the creative process and the creative individual through the requirements and expectations they pose.

Creativity and Press Tom Heath (1993) is one of the few authors writing on creativity and design who address the social in relation to the generation of innovative outcomes. He proposes a ‘constraint model of design’, arguing that personal skills and abilities ‘do not become effective, or creative, unless they are harnessed in an appropriate social figuration or field’ (Heath 1993: 11); that is, creativity requires opportunity. He contends that constraints, or lack of opportunities, are not inherently ‘fixed’; it is to a large extent socially defined, expressing the resolutions, aspirations, values, beliefs and, at times, speculations of people within a particular field. The constraints derive from the designer’s specialist knowledge (education) and their personal (professional) experience, as well as from consultants, clients, users and others. This model resembles the socio-psychological concept of creativity with its intrinsic and extrinsic motivation or internal and external press (e.g. Amabile 1993, 1996). Heath’s proposal emphasises the exploratory character of design by which designers more or less systematically locate constraints and demands, and gradually focus in on the solution space.

Change in conceptual thinking The importance bestowed upon the social environment by Heath (1993) and McLaughlin (1993) resembles the point made by the contextualist approaches to creativity in the expansion of the concept from a focus on one strand—person, product or process—to one that encapsulates all, including press. Moreover, it moves the idea of design creativity away from it being seen as simply the result of rigorous problem solving or of spontaneous improvisation. As has been illustrated in this chapter, creativity is now generally understood as a complex phenomenon in which aspects related to person, process, product and press intertwine. The widespread move towards a confluence approach in fields of creativity research has, however, taken a different course in the design domain. Whereas the idea of creativity within disciplines such as psychology, pedagogy and sociology, have developed from

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the romantic and individualist concepts, contemporary theoretical and practical approaches to creativity in design have always been, to some extent, removed from this paradigm. This separation is related to the particular nature of design problems and the conflicting requirements of function and form—though creativity is embedded within the disciplines of design, so is the necessity to adhere to the constraints posed by the particular context in which the design activity takes place or to which it relates. This emphasis on function and constraints can be seen as underpinning theories that present creativity as a rational problem solving process. However, alternative theories such as the reflective paradigm and the integrative approach do not dismiss the role of boundaries and rules either. Rather, they remain committed to the importance of contextual factors, but acknowledge how these factors themselves are subject to variation and change. What seems apparent in contemporary theories of design and creativity is that there has been a gradual shift towards the idea that design creativity is the result of an ongoing process of negotiation and transformation of problems and sub-problems, solutions and sub-solutions. Design creativity is thus intimately connected to the ill-defined nature of design problems; it is through the problem that the boundaries and rules that guide the creative process are set. Creativity is, however, not simply a rational or a relative problem-solving process; nor is it the outcome of a process or a characteristic of a product. Instead it is increasingly perceived as a multidimensional concept that, in design, is understood by acknowledging process and product, as well as the social and individual aspects that guide them.

Conclusion This chapter has provided an overview of some of the major approaches to creativity. The brief summary of these different approaches illustrates the diversity of theories, opinions and ideas that surround the concept. Creativity, as a theoretical field, is filled with overlapping and often contradictory ideas and themes. This complexity is also evident in the practical fields of creativity including design. However, despite the divergence of opinions that exist, there is broad agreement across contemporary theoretical approaches, as well as within pragmatic approaches, concerning the fundamental role of multiple variables related to person, process, product and press, and the need to place any approach within a broad rationalist framework. The next chapter explores these divergences and similarities further through a review of the contributions included in Part Two of the book.

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Reviewing the Responses: Structuring the Matrices

These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that ate trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f ) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that trembles as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush, (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase, (n) that from a distance resembles flies. Jorge Luis Borges (1999: 231) Jorge Luis Borges’ (1999: 234) provocative ‘Chinese Encyclopaedia’ definition of animals is an example of how, as noted by Michel Foucault (1994), the relationship between objects is defined through the structure in which they are identified. The taxonomical structure, in this sense, may link objects and texts which would not normally be related. Foucault uses this example, of an idiosyncratic, but still potentially sensible system of classification, to reveal the way in which power structures are implicit in any attempt to classify or define the elements of a field. While Borges Chinese Encyclopaedia is most often deployed in arguments to warn against the blind or uncritical adoption of certain types of knowledge, it also serves as an intentionally ironic reminder that each person necessarily orders the world in their own way. As the previous chapter illustrates, the history of creativity is replete with alternative definitions and propositions. While it might be possible to accept one of these as a logical and viable starting point, and several conceivably fit these criteria, there remain elements of truth and insight in even the oldest, most simplistic and largely rejected propositions. This is even true if, for no other reason than by reviewing the definition, it is possible to uncover the political and social values of the progenitors of these theories and definitions. This is Focuault’s legacy, described in The Order of Things, which reveals that the study of the structure of knowledge, like the structure of institutions,

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reveals certain biases in the societies which originally supported and propagated such systems, views or ideas. As a theoretical concept, ‘creativity’ remains relatively controversial; it is central to a field wherein abstract theories blend with myths, stereotypes and everyday perceptions. Moreover, even though there is a wide range of definitions available, this does not necessarily imply that any of them are in regular use. In order to address this issue, the authors held a symposium in Melbourne in June 2010, where it was confirmed that this complexity and diversity is also reflected in practice. The senior design academics and practitioners who participated in the event presented definitions of creativity derived from a mixture of theoretical and pragmatic approaches. Their definitions ranged from those addressing creativity as a practical ability with which designers face problems, to those that view creativity as a cognitive ability that lies beyond the reach of the conscious mind. Creativity was also portrayed as the characteristic of a process, as a trait of individuals, as an acquired skill, as something that is external to the individual, as inert ability, and as a social construct. To bring a loose structure to these proceedings 22 senior design academics and practitioners attending the symposium were invited to submit a short response to five questions about creativity, design and assessment; namely: 1. What is ‘creativity’? 2. How does creativity present itself in your discipline? 3. What role does creativity play in design? 4. What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? 5. Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? In addition to the 22 academics and practitioners who participated in the event, another 17 experts, many of whom were drawn from around the world, were also invited to respond to the same five questions. The questions were deliberately open-ended, allowing each contributor to approach and interpret them in their own way. Subsequently, some of the responses reflect a strongly pragmatic approach, whereas others are of a more theoretical nature; some focus on how creativity relates to the discipline, whilst a few focus on creativity as a general phenomenon; some responses have the character of a conversation, whilst others reflect the nature of academic essays; some are very short, whilst others are

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longer; a selection focus on the philosophical aspects of creativity, whilst others focus on the practical aspects; some emphasise creativity as a phenomenon, some emphasise it as a concept, and yet others emphasise it as a trait. Despite the different approaches and interpretations, the way in which the questions were framed allowed for comparison and reflection. In this chapter we will discuss the main issues identified in the responses and relate these back to the literature reviewed in the previous chapter. The following discussion is arranged according to a series of overlapping, non-mutually exclusive, taxonomical structures. Whereas the five questions might appear to be limiting—a methodological bias that reduces diversity—the analysis of these responses has been undertaken using five expansive systems of delineation; represented in the matrices that follow the 39 expert responses. As these matrices overlap, they cannot be interpreted as a holistic process of division, but rather, like Borges Encyclopaedia, the set of results is categorised in accordance with a specific perspective, and the presence of a particular theme or issue in the response. The categorisation does not explain how this issue is approached and/or resolved—as a result, we recommend using the matrices as an index to guide your reading towards responses that deal with or reflect particular issues.

Discipline and Approach The present book includes contributions from academics and practitioners from different design fields, including architecture, design, interior design, industrial design and landscape design. In conjunction with these, there are contributions from a psychologist (Arne Dietrich), an expert in creative communication (Ruth Dineen) and a professor of computation and creative media (Ernest Edmonds). From the responses, it is evident that there is no direct correlation between particular disciplines and approaches to creativity. There is a clear divergence—independent of discipline— between the views of those that take a pragmatic stance and those who adopt a theoretical approach to the questions. The pragmatists base their responses on their experience as designers and/or teachers, and present statements that relate directly to students’ creative abilities. In contrast, the more theoretical approaches tend to focus their answers on the general body of theoretical work or more specifically on the cognitive and psychological theories that exist on the topic instead of on the practical aspect of teaching courses that contain creative dimensions. For example, Geoff Clark, one of the contributors who outlines a pragmatic approach, argues that:

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[c]reativity presents itself in architecture through the development of built responses to design problems that successfully address issues that must be resolved, but then finds the opportunities in a problem that can allow the consideration and development of aspects of the project that should be resolved, or, could be resolved. This can be contrasted to the more theoretical approach adopted by Susan Savage, who proposes that ‘creativity is the result of interaction/s of various parts of the brain; these interactions generate productive types of thinking.’ Savage perceives creativity as a cognitive activity and her definition is largely based on neuroscientific research on the topic. According to Savage, creativity represents a particular way of thinking that allows designers to (critically) handle a wide range of variables and to order, reorder and prioritise variables according to schemas that identify value and appropriateness. As such, it is essential to architecture; it is the quality that enables a designer to imagine possibilities, to play around with these possibilities through recoding and decoding, and to create something of value by reconfiguring and aligning the various parts associated with a problem. However, while Savage compares what she calls ‘creative thinking’ with ‘design thinking, the definition that she proposes places the phenomenon of creativity beyond the practical activities of architecture and design. Subsequently, when considering the five questions, she contends that: A person may have invoked creativity (that is the particular brain activity which is poorly understood by neuroscience) to produce the artefact, but then again they may not have done so—and from the outside we will never know. The products of a person’s actions just ‘are’. The intangible element referred to in this citation is at the heart of the larger project that this book supports; it is connected to the challenge of finding an explanation of how (1) particular abilities held by individuals guide (2) particular processes that result in (3) particular outcomes. These three different aspects of creativity refer to different approaches to creativity; that is, they refer to creativity as a psychological, philosophical or ontological phenomenon, as practice, and as a characteristic of artefacts. The interconnectedness between these three different approaches and the often uncritical use of the term ‘creativity’ as a singular, heterogeneous concept lies at the centre of the problem of defining creativity. In their different ways, the many contributors to this book deal with this dilemma and try to find a focus for understanding creativity by unravelling some of the complexity surrounding the term. The 39 contributors all present their individual interpretation of the five questions, subsequently displaying a

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diversity of opinions and ideas about creativity, design and education. Yet despite these varied approaches, ideas and opinions, there are, as will be discussed, some compelling similarities.

Overarching principles Given the breadth of opinion, one of the ways to categorise the contributions is to classify them according to the two main historical approaches to creativity: romanticism and rationalism. As was discussed in the previous chapter, the romantic paradigm refers to the idea that creativity is the result of divine inspiration; a process of unfettered and undisciplined searching, as unconscious and spontaneous effort, and as a reflection of innate (or divine) forces that cannot be promoted or fostered. Despite romanticism’s inherent contradiction to educational efforts of promoting creativity and the growth of scientific explanations that refute such concepts, quite a few of the contributions contain romantic elements. Barbara de la Harpe, for example, argues that both conscious and unconscious insight guides the creative process and that creativity reflects an ‘other’ or a ‘magic’ element; that is, an artefact identified as being creative will entail an element that transcends the tangible and that is difficult to articulate in words, to describe or touch. The idea of an intangible is also evident in Hamile Demirkan’s contribution, in which she argues that: Since creativity has a complex nature, there is no single definition that fully encompasses the concept. Today, the widely accepted view is that creativity is a process of the mind. Therefore, creativity cannot be analysed as a deliberate process, since the intuitive qualities are also influential. Similarly, Julia Werner argues that ‘[a] strong creative approach to landscape design involves accepting and trusting knowledge gained through intuition, sensations and emotions.’ Moreover, she argues, ‘creativity is the result of a combination of talent, nurture and also discipline, which demands regular and sustained practice.’ This last quote illustrates how most of the contributors whose responses reflect elements of the romantic tradition, including de la Harpe, Demirkan and Werner, place this within a broader rationalist framework. In most instances, the romantic legacy refers to the acknowledgement of the role of the individual actor—the person—and the way their personality, innate motivation and inert traits, can influence the creative process. Even those contributions that portray romantic elements beyond the individual retain an element of rationalism. Des Smith, for example, argues that:

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[…] creativity is that point of knowing retention coupled with activation. In the modern world (both east and west), I think it is the former description with which we tend to sense ourselves working. As a way of seeing these definitions acting in concert, Joseph Campbell would suggest that ‘the creative spirit ranges free out there in the Universe’ and we recognise, with a rather fuller consciousness, those points and places where we actively and knowingly engage this creative energy. The idea of a ‘creative spirit’ resonates with the romantic paradigm and it suggests a force beyond the individual that might be accessed. However, Smith qualifies this claim, when arguing that creativity is also embedded in the places ‘where the measurable and the unmeasurable’ meet. Subsequently, he repositions the individual within the creative process and gives the individual creative agency—the individual can take charge of a creative process by entering the area of the unmeasurable and negotiating this with the measurable. There are additional contributors who reflect the romantic idea of creativity as work that is both complex and historically influential. Peter Wood, for example, reproduces John Tusa’s (2003: 6) definition of creativity as ‘the exceptional act of imaginative discovery and expression in an art form’. Creativity is not about personal expression or expressive productivity, but rather, as he explains, ‘[t]o be successfully creative in the field of architecture requires exceptional imagination and expression, not everyday expressiveness and imagining.’ Though Wood speaks of creativity according to the romantic view of exceptional acts, his contribution is, ultimately, of a rationalist nature. The pragmatic, rational nature of his response is evident in the following quote: I approach architectural design as a process concerned with identifying innovative and original solutions to clearly defined problems of an ‘architectural’ nature. In practice, most of these problems tend to be programmatic but they can equally be philosophical or expressive as long as they are tested against an architectural application (incorporating any mode of architectural communication). The two key components are ‘innovation’ and ‘application’. Though romantic elements are identified in some of the contributions, it would be incorrect to classify any of the contributions, in their totality, as ‘romantic’. Rather it illustrates the complexity embedded in the rationalist approach and, yet again, turns our attention to the challenge of finding a balance between the role of the individual, the processes and the artefacts that are labelled ‘creative.’ Rather than juxtaposing

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romanticism and rationalism as two binary approaches, it may be possible to speak of levels of romantic and rational elements in any approach. This idea is articulated by Sandra Kaji-O’Grady who observes that ‘[i]n the 20th century we might refer to “aptitude”, but that hardly comes close to the Renaissance notion of creativity as an innate and compelling force of character fated by birth.’ Creativity is, she argues, […] often presented in our discipline [architecture], as in others, as sudden insights had by uniquely gifted individuals leading to novel outcomes. It is presented in mythical and mysterious terms yet, at the same time, efforts are made in teaching creativity in discrete activities. Indeed, she maintains that, the ‘establishment of tertiary programs in the creative industries assumes that creativity can be taught and, in turn, measured—that it is not simply a gift or talent.’ Considering the educational focus of this book, it is not surprising that all of the responses can be classified as rationalist in this way; all contributors emphasise creativity as something (i.e. a person, a process or a product) that can be fostered, promoted and developed. Examples of more rationalist approaches include that of Harry Margalit, whose short definition of creativity is ‘the socially validated application of imagination’, and that of Louise Wallis, who argues that: [c]reativity is the act which enables the development of a novel or new idea or product that is deemed a valuable contribution within the intended field and judged so by its peers […] creativity does not solely exist within the individual, but is also informed, read and made within the environment and society. This draws our attention to another discussion, namely that of nature and nurture; a version of the debate between the romantic and rationalist approaches to creativity. The nature-nurture debate is beyond the scope of this book, though it draws our attention to the question of whether or not creativity is a quality—an ability—with which particularly gifted individuals are born, or if it is something developed—an ability and an approach—that is developed through the lifespan of the individual. Within contemporary educational circles, there is a general consensus that the latter is correct; creativity reflects a psychological aspect that is present, at least as potential, in everyone. As Julie Werner proposes in her contribution: […] all of us are somehow creative in the way we carry out our lives. However, creativity as a specifically productive category requires more refined personality traits. While everyone is born with some degree of

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creative potential, some are able to develop this more than others, due to a range of factors and attributes. The everyday creativity exhibited by all individuals in the way they carry out their lives is often referred to as ‘little c’ creativity or ‘low level’ creativity. It is contrasted to the developed, more sophisticated form of creativity that characterises the work and actions of some, often called ‘big C’ or ‘high level’ Creativity. Another variation of this distinction is Margaret Boden’s (2004) delineation of ‘psychological’ creativity (P-creativity) and ‘historical’ creativity (H-creativity), colloquially identified as ‘personal’ and ‘historical’ creativity. As Boden (2004: 2) explains: P-creativity involves coming up with a surprising, valuable idea that’s new to the person who comes up with it. It doesn’t matter how many people have had that idea before. But if a new idea is H-creative, that means that (so far as we know) no one else has had it before: it has arisen for the first time in human history. Contributors including Ernest Edmonds and Ranulph Glanville make direct reference to Boden’s categories, though they resonate in many of the other contributions as well. The distinction can play a useful role when considering creativity in relation to education. Firstly, it affirms that education has a role to play in regards to creativity; it also suggests that there is a scale of creative effort and, subsequently, an opportunity for development, fostering and promotion of creative ability. Secondly, it provides a framework for the assessment of students’ creative efforts; it thereby allows acknowledgement of individual achievements and growth. This brings us to the question about the role of the educational environment in providing opportunities for developing and gaining skills, expertise, practical and theoretical knowledge, and experience in a particular field; which further opens up a discussion about creativity as a general versus a discipline-specific phenomenon. Through disciplinary practice and engagement with particular environments, fields or domains, creative potential—innate or fostered—is positioned in relation to, and promoted by, knowledge and mastery. This will potentially lead to a discipline-specific expression of creativity. As Harry Margalit argues, for a person’s actions or the products of their actions to be creative, ‘[t]here needs to be demonstrated mastery of the field (or parts of the field) so that the transcendence of the commonplace can be recognised.’ However, does this suggest that creativity is different in different disciplines, or simply that it expresses itself differently due to the particular mediums of expression? Ranulph Glanville considers this question in his contribution where he contends that:

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I am not sure that creativity presents itself differently in different fields, except in detail. By this I mean that creativity presents itself in any and all disciplines. I see no fundamental difference in how I find creativity in any of the subjects I meet. There are differences of medium (of expression): in design I see creativity in drawings, models, writing, presentation, spoken words, performance. I see it in conversation and in groups. But most of all, I see it in approach, in research, and in the faces of my students. I am inclined to see creativity everywhere. This citation suggests that, despite disciplinary variance in expression, there is an overall phenomenon that can be called ‘creativity’ that is independent of discipline. A similar perspective is provided by Antony Radford who, based on his experience of teaching in three distinct areas (architecture, urban design and digital design) argues that ‘[c]reativity presents itself similarly in all three areas as a combination of novelty and value; it is not a discipline-specific phenomenon.’ Indeed, when considering the many contributions to this book, it becomes clear that there is a general consensus about creativity. The contributions mirror an overarching understanding of creativity across disciplines and fields, and, as will be shown in the subsequent sections, the difference lies in the detail.

The 4Ps Evidently, to some extent, all the contributions to this book draw on the rationalist paradigm. This general similarity in approach is also evident in the fact that almost all of the contributions make reference to creativity in relation to person, process, product and press—the Rhodes categorical scheme of 4Ps introduced in the previous chapter. This is illustrated in the various contributions through an emphasis on personal variables, including personal traits, values, attitudes, approach, ability, knowledge, skill, experience, mastery, competence and motivation; through the consideration of process in terms of problem solving and opportunity seizing, reflection on the stages of a (creative) design process including preparation, illumination, inspiration, incubation, verification and evaluation, through the concepts of production and development including risk taking, curiosity and exploration, and through consideration of contextual influences on process; through consideration of the descriptive values of a so-called creative product, such as value, appropriateness, novelty, originality, freshness, future orientation, adaptability and appropriateness; and, through consideration of press factors—environmental factors—that place restrictions upon and create opportunities for creative agency, and allow for concepts such as field and domain.

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Key words The examples of personal, processual, product and press factors listed above refer to the difference that exists in the details of approaching the 4Ps; that is, contributors who emphasise all the 4Ps may propose very different interpretations or divergent emphasis on each of these elements. Hernan Casakin, for example, refers to key words such as ability, mastery, problem solving, imagination, originality, novelty, value, surprise, risk and play; Andrea Mina refers to ability, imagination, originality, value and re-creation; Ranulph Glanville refers to difference, surprise, future orientation and boundaries/ context; whilst Clare Newton refers to ability, intelligence, mastery, problem solving, novelty and re-creation. The variation in detail is most clearly illustrated in Matrix Four following the contributions.

Assessment The last matrix and the last question address the issue of assessment. In general, the responses received to this question draw on the responses to the previous chapter and, as in perceptions of creativity, show vast variation in the way the contributors consider the task of assessing creativity in design education. Three of the most controversial responses to this question are posed by Brit Andresen, Susan Savage, and Sarah Treadwell, who all suggest that creativity is beyond the reach of assessment. Andresen argues that ‘[a]ny assessment in architectural education should focus on those areas that can be, and are, taught—avoiding phenomena that as yet cannot be taught, such as “creativity”.’ Similarly, Savage contends that: [t]he products of creative thinking can be assessed. Indeed this is all that can be assessed since even neuroscientists struggle to identify, let alone assess, creativity itself. Our attempts, therefore, to assess creativity (the process) as educators would be amateur at best, dangerous at worst (descending as they would most likely do to the depths of pop-psychology), and fundamentally biased—we do not assess other parts of students’ brain-workings; why would we assess this one? Savage’s argument that creativity cannot be assessed—that it is beyond the reach of design educators—is reflected in Sarah Treadwell’s contribution, in which she states that: [w]e cannot assess creativity, just the things that it makes or changes, and they get assessed with parameters of the formal, programmatic, technical and

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representational. We assess the makings that emerge from work practices but creativity itself is seen only in its traces, residues, and its denials. Creativity might be recognised after time has passed. As is evident in these quotes, the question of assessing creativity relies heavily on the definition and approach adopted. Both Savage and Treadwell propose a definition of creativity that reflects the romantic ideas about creativity being difficult, if not impossible, to understand and explain in plain terms. As illustrated in the previous citation by Savage, she adopts a neuroscientific approach to creativity. In contrast, Treadwell places her definition within the context of design, though her definition remains highly theoretical. She contends that: [r]ather than being a received attribute associated with a particular talented individual, creativity might be more usefully seen in design studios as a precondition that operates with openness and activates potential; creativity as an empty precursor to making. Faced with the blank screen, creativity, as a starting point, offers insecurity in its absence and a sort of terror when it is manifest. It cannot be forced or coerced and it is not possible to drive or employ creativity; rather it may be solicited or recognised. In contrast to Andresen, Savage and Treadwell who argue that creativity cannot be assessed, there are other contributors who contend that there are elements of creativity that cannot be assessed and some that can. People expressing this opinion include Ruth Dineen, Margaret Portillo, Richard Tucker and Louise Wallis. Dineen argues that creativity can be assessed ‘by breadth of purposeful experimentation, or by quantity, originality and appropriateness of ideas’, however assessment is problematic in terms of the internal, even unconscious, elements that form part of the creative process, and in regards to the contextual factors that affect judgement of creative outcomes. Portillo acknowledges the difficulties that have been identified by scholars in ‘tapping into the act of creation’, and argues that ‘no matter the methodological sophistication, creativity at a certain level is inherently mysterious’. It is, however, possible to assess certain constructs of creativity through a holistic approach that considers both quantitative variables identified by ‘what’ and ‘how much’, as a well as why and how. Tucker similarly argues that there is an element of the creative process that is beyond assessment, though ‘creativity […] can be assessed.’ He qualifies this statement by arguing that: although we cannot assess the creative leap, we can assess the actions that preceded it to inform it, we can assess its outcome (the idea) and we can

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assess the process that occurs after the leap that progresses the idea toward a design solution. Most of the contributors do, however, emphasis that elements of creativity can be assessed—both in terms of the creative product and the creative process—and they suggest various ways in which this can be done. Some argue for assessment by teams or a panel of experts. Others champion the use of themes and assessment criteria, whilst others advocate the use of rubrics and metrics. One of the contributors, Tom Heneghan, sets himself apart from the others when arguing that creativity can, relatively easily, be assessed as being present or not. But, filtering it into different grades of creativity is very difficult (probably even counterproductive in design education) because the creativity of a work may be in its nuanced reticence or in its flamboyant exaggeration. The only viable assessment method is pass/fail. Some of the contributors argue that assessment is, ultimately, subjective and they propose different ways of solving this. Ben Hughes, for example, proposes a consideration of the requirement of creativity in design assessment, arguing that: [i]t would be problematic to introduce the word [creativity] itself into assessment criteria because, as described above, creativity for its own sake is not necessarily of any great value. Creativity cannot be standardised to a sufficient extent to be effectively assessed. Other respondents, including Alex Selenitsch, promote the use of comparison as a means of assessment. Creativity, he argues, ‘is constantly being assessed through comparison: firstly, against the habitual response to the same situation; and, secondly, against other creative responses to the same situation.’ There are two levels of comparison, he argues: firstly, there is the simple comparison between the new and the old work—which one represents a better solution? Secondly, there is the use of a number (minimum two; ten being a good optimum) of propositions or designs that can be compared against each other. He concludes his contribution, as we will conclude this section, with the following words: The ranking of creativity through marks, stars or elephant stamps has nothing to do with creativity. For critics, it is lazy shorthand, for educators it is a pact with (habitual) bureaucracy, for patrons and commissioners it is an opportunity to exercise power.

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Conclusion In Part Two of this book, rather than speaking through the isolated fragments and overarching criteria present in this chapter, the contributors speak for themselves, providing full answers to the five questions. As is illustrated in this chapter, their ideas, thoughts, opinions and approaches to creativity vary. Each and every response says something valuable about the way in which educators and practitioners think about creativity and promote creativity. It would be futile to try to develop a singular model, theory or definition from these contributions, even though there are recurring themes. Instead, the reader can take this opportunity to begin to understand the diversity of informed or expert opinion about creativity and, hopefully, through this process, develop a heightened understanding of the issues that may challenge any singular and simplistic definitions of creativity.

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Part Two

From Theory to Practice: 39 Opinions

Brit Andresen THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

What is ‘creativity’?

Norwegian architect Brit Andresen teaches and practices in Australia where she is Professor of Architecture at The University of Queensland. She has also taught at the Cambridge University School of Architecture, the Architectural Association London and the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was awarded The University of Queensland Teaching Excellence Award in 1991. Her current teaching and research areas include building design with landscape, architecture and urban change and relationships between ideas and practice. Her project Sedimentary City, which she is leading together with Mara Francis, was selected for stage two of the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA) competition ‘A Future Australian City 2050+’ for the Venice Biennale 2010. Projects from the architectural partnership of Brit Andresen and Peter O’Gorman include timber houses that explore the expressive capacity of eucalyptus and relationships with the Australian landscape. Her research work with Peter O’Gorman has been published, reviewed and exhibited in

‘Creativity’ is a relatively contemporary term that is periodically re-conceptualised. ‘Creativity’ has no single authoritative definition at this time. ‘Creativity’ is not yet measureable by psychometrics. ‘Creativity’ is affected by state of mind and mood. ‘Creativity’ is without a standardised measurement technique. ‘Creativity’ is a term attributed to a person perceived to be in the state of ‘being creative’. ‘Creativity’ may be a kind of human intelligence. ‘Creativity’ is involved in making actions, sounds or ‘things’, the outcome of which often involves the transformation of codes–at other times it may be described as ‘mad’.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? ‘Creativity’ is an unstable term that has come to mean many things: from the simple ‘to make’, to the more complex ‘to compose’, and even to the puzzling ‘to originate or to create from nothing’. The ‘creative act’ is believed to involve the ‘transformation of codes’. Despite this abstraction, the ‘act’ may be still devoid of contextual or ethical considerations essential to the architecture discipline. In the discipline of architecture, ‘creativity’ presents itself as closely linked with other forms of intelligence yielding a capacity for what is commonly referred to as ‘architectural synthesis’. Architectural synthesis for a constructed architectural work involves acts of reinvention and reinterpretation that take place in the complex context of cultural, environmental and technological constraints, amid a myriad of competing demands.

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Australia and overseas. In 2002 she was awarded the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) Gold Medal and elected RAIA Life Fellow in 2006.

The ability of the architect to carry out an ‘architectural synthesis’ presents itself only through built works. Architectural synthesis necessarily includes a developed empathic imagination—one that makes us more at home in the world and presents itself in architecture through experiencing the built work.

What role does creativity play in design? In the discipline of architecture, ‘design’ is the contemporary term given to more traditional ‘compositions’—aspects that form part of the architectural synthesis process. ‘Creativity’, if accepted as a transformation of codes, plays a significant but small part in design, and only when drawn together with other forms of intelligence does it contribute to architectural synthesis.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? What makes Alvar Aalto’s Saynatsalo Town Hall a work of architecture? This work simultaneously engages the contexts of culture, technology and environment. This work synthesises the poetic and pragmatic through the use of reinterpretation and analogy. This work appears effortlessly planned and composed. This work engages the concerns of both human aspiration and daily life. And so on.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? ‘Creativity’ is said to be a term attributed to a person perceived to be in the state of being ‘creative’—a phenomenon that has, as yet, no agreed measures unlike the IQ (albeit of disputed value) ‘Creativity’ today is treated as a commodity and has been hijacked by commercial and academic interests. Built works of architecture are routinely assessed and in many ways. Any assessment in architectural education should focus on those areas

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Brit Andresen

‘Creativity’ today is treated as a commodity and has been hijacked by commercial and academic interests.

that can be, and are, taught—avoiding phenomena that as yet cannot be taught, such as ‘creativity’. Architectural education, in fostering the development of architectural synthesis, does include practices and processes that can be both taught and assessed. Grading in architectural education should be significantly reduced, as assessment in architectural education is not a useful ‘driver’ in fostering or attempting to acquire architectural ability.

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Hernan Casakin Ariel university centre of samaria

What is ‘creativity’? Creativity is recognised as a fascinating, puzzling, inspiring and nonroutine human capacity dealing with original thinking and innovation. Dr. Hernan Casakin is a Senior Davidovitch and Milgram (2006) define innovation in terms of the Lecturer in the School of uncommon or statistically infrequent, remarkable, and valuable. Creative Architecture, Ariel University thinking is also related to the cognitive ability to perceive known situations Center of Samaria. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture and from new viewpoints. It is frequently defined as a personal ability to Town Planning from the University apply critical thinking in order to explore unconventional alternatives, of Mar del Plata, Argentina, restructure old ideas that may lead to the invention, or discovery of and a Master and a PhD in outstanding outcomes (Csikszentmihalyi 1997). Creativity also embraces Architecture from the Technion imaginative or surprising ideas (Guilford 1981; Mednick 1962), and – IIT, Haifa, Israel. Hernan has perceiving reality in ways that others may overlook (Wallach 1970). In over sixteen years experience of teaching design studio supported relation to problem solving, De Bono (1977) suggests that creativity by a cognitive and creativityis a capacity to explore a variety of innovative solutions using different based research approach. His unconventional methods. Moreover, innovative problem solving demands professional experience includes the use of cognitive processes that may play a critical role in the creation appointments as Research Fellow of remarkable solutions (Finke et al. 1992). According to Milgram and in the Department of Cognitive Arad (1981), a creative solution can be abstract, such as a mathematical Sciences and Computer Science, Hamburg University, Germany, algorithm, or concrete, like an industrial design product. Recently, a and in the Environmental distinction has been established between domain-general and domainSimulation Laboratory, Tel specific creativity (Kaufman & Baer 2005). While the former refers to a Aviv University, Israel. high capacity for general creative thinking to generate innovative ideas in a broad number of domains, the latter is concerned with the production of Hernan is a Member of the Editorial Board of the Open creative ideas related to a particular field (e.g. Baer 1998). In this regard, Environmental Sciences Journal Hong and Millgram (2008) proposed a new theoretical formulation about and of the Journal of Civil these two types of creative thinking abilities that not only differentiates, Engineering and Architecture, but also establishes a relationship between them. and is a reviewer in a number of design journals such as Engineering Research Methods. His research has been published widely in international peer reviewed journals, book chapters and book proceedings of international conferences.

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How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Creative thinking abilities are fundamental for the development of creative aptitudes in architecture, and in architectural design in particular. Creativity is considered a central aspect in both architectural education and professional practice. In addition to being useful and functional, an architectural outcome is expected to be valuable and innovative

Creative thinking abilities are funda-mental for the development of creative aptitudes in architecture, and in architectural design in particular.

(Christiaans 2002). Similar to most design problems, architectural problems are ill-structured since they are complex, ambiguous, and the initial goals are not fully formulated (e.g. Simon 1981). Architectural problems are unique and, as such, they are difficult to define and represent (e.g. Goel 1985). Consequently, they cannot be completely solved through the use of routine problem solving procedures or the application of known operators or algorithms (Gero 1996). Solving problems in the architectural domain demands creative thinking abilities necessary to arrive at unpredictable solutions (Suwa, Gero & Purcell 1999). As Hsiao and Chou (2004) claim, architectural design is a non-routine problem-solving activity that depends heavily on expertise and knowledge, as well as on creative thinking. Thus, apart from intuition and many trials, solving architectural problems demands talent and creativity (Casakin & Kreitler 2005). Furthermore, due to the ill-defined nature of architectural problems, a relatively large number of studies have proliferated on the development and application of models, methods and strategies for enhancing, supporting, or facilitating the generation of creativity in architectural design (e.g. Akin & Akin 1996; Gero 1996; Lawson 2005; MacKinnon 1965; Schmitt 1993).

What role does creativity play in design? Design is a complex domain that demands the generation and development of creative and original ideas. It involves the existence of novel problem situations that in general cannot be solved by retrieving prior knowledge. Successful design problem solving depends not only on the knowledge and cognitive abilities of the designer, but also on his or her level of creativity. A characteristic of a creative design process is the exploration and development of a vast number of solutions beyond the designer’s own knowledge that takes place in a metaphorical search space (Goldschmidt et al. 1996; Newell & Simon 1972). The exploration of design ideas from the earlier stages of the design process plays a significant role in achieving this aim. The more concepts and ideas the designer is able to inspect, the more likely the chances of reaching innovative and unexpected solutions (e.g. Cross 1997). Candy and Edmonds (1996) also show that the design process consists of an intrinsically creative and exploratory activity. These researchers have found that creative cognition processes are responsible for the discovery of new ideas and the production of new artefacts. Designers showing

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Creative designers seek to excel in their disciplines, and they constantly search for new challenges, even in the face of significant risks.

creative design processes, have a cognitive capacity that enables them to make abstractions and transfer relationships from one remote domain to another, and to view the problem as a whole rather than in small parts. In another study about design processes, Goldschmidt and Tatsa (2005) consider how designers explore different types of ideas, and how these affect the design process. They argue that a creative design process consists of making moves from one stage to another through small steps, while producing creative ideas that lead to new ones. An outcome of this is a network of strongly interrelated ‘good’ ideas.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? The open and ill-defined nature of design problems represents an opportunity for the promotion of creative actions and the production of creative products. The singularity of these types of problems allows creative designers to propose their own agendas and personal goals. Furthermore, the personality of the designer is also considered to play an important role in creative actions leading to creative products. In a study on creativity in architectural design, Mackinnon (1965) notes that, whereas the most creative designers attempt to produce a standard of excellence, the least creative ones produce outcomes that only met the general standards of the architectural profession. According to Hanna and Barber (2001), acts of creative designers are characterised by a sense of play, fluency, spontaneity, independence of judgement, and a need to be original. Creative designers are also cognitively flexible, which enables them to establish associations between different and remote domains of knowledge to produce new and creative outcomes. Creative designers seek to excel in their disciplines, and they constantly search for new challenges, even in the face of significant risks. They have a large variety of interests and huge motivation (Barron & Harrington 1981; Candy & Edmonds 1996). Together with Kreitler, I have found that motivation in architectural design is the engine that provides the driving force to engage in creative performance (Casakin & Kreitler 2010; Kreitler & Casakin 2009b). Our studies show that attitudes and personality tendencies promote creativity, and we observed significant differences with respect to a number of motivational themes between more creative and less creative student designers. Examples of themes

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Herman Casakin

A large number of studies in design creativity centre on the definition of creativity, the study of the personality of designers, and the development of tools for supporting or promoting design creativity.

depicting the more creative students are: readiness to make efforts and invest in creative acts; willingness to use talent to achieve originality in design outcomes; freedom to apply individual criteria and delve into the unknown. These results suggest important implications for improving design education.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? A large number of studies in design creativity centre on the definition of creativity, the study of the personality of designers, and the development of tools for supporting or promoting design creativity. However, few investigations focus on the objective assessment of creativity in design. Despite the existing consensus regarding the importance of creativity for design, the assessment of creativity still needs further clarification. Identifying the instruments and criteria for assessing design processes and design outcomes remains a challenge. This can be partly ascribed to the difficulty in defining creative thinking in design operationally, and measuring it objectively (Casakin, Davidovitch &Millgram 2010). Since the evaluation of creativity in design is not well understood, it remains more intuitive than objective. Quite often, creativity is assessed in global and unspecified terms. Design experts are expected to share common views about design creativity; and, indeed, they tend to agree on the overall quality of a design. However, the criteria or parameters on which their evaluations are assumed to be based remain vague, subjective and biased (Darling-Hammond & Snyder 2000). In many cases, design projects are assessed as more creative by merit of their aesthetic formalism than due to the originality of the outcome (Ward 1990). In other situations, evaluators are unaware of how a final outcome reflects the process and the thinking of the designer. Hence, there is need to explore and understand, as objectively as possible, the measures and procedures that could be used to evaluate creative designs. In an attempt to define precise criteria to assess creativity, Guilford (1981) and Torrance (1974) propose four factors dealing with fluency (number of relevant responses), flexibility (different categories of relevant responses), elaboration (amount of detail in the responses) and originality (statistical rarity of the responses). In our recent study (see Casakin & Kreitler 2008; Kreitler & Casakin 2009a), we provide evidence of the relevance of these factors, as well as other factors such as functionality and aesthetics, in the assessment of creativity in architecture.

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Herman Casakin

The creativity tests comprise an application of divergent thinking, the ability to generate many original ideas, cognitive flexibility and transformation abilities.

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In 1970, Moore carried out ground-breaking research on the assessment of creative thinking in architectural design education. He found that eight tests of creative thinking in problem solving developed by the University of Southern California Psychological Laboratory, on the basis of the work of Guilford (1967) and Guilford and Hoefner (1966), are better predictors of success in architecture studies at a university level than the traditional procedures used in the selection process (e.g. high-school records, college entrance examinations and the Architectural School Aptitude Test) (Moore 1970). The creativity tests comprise an application of divergent thinking, the ability to generate many original ideas, cognitive flexibility and transformation abilities. Moreover, Casakin, Davidovitch and Milgram (2010) investigated domain-general creative thinking, operationally defined as the quantity of ideational fluency, as a predictor of domain-specific creative thinking in architectural design. They found a strong relationship between the two measures, and recommend using these tools in admission procedures. Kreitler (2004) on the other hand proposes an instrument that can assess themes of motivation identified as relevant for creativity. We have explored these themes further in our more recent studies (Kreitler & Casakin 2009b) as predictors of assessed creativity in architecture, revealing strong relations between these themes and the creativity factor. These studies constitute an important step in the assessment of design creativity. However, more research is needed in order to gain a better understanding of creativity and provide further empirical evidence for its assessment. This book constitutes a praised effort in that direction.

GEOFF CLARK the university of tasmania

What is ‘creativity’?

Geoff Clark graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Sydney in 1989. He is a Director of Troppo Architects, an internationally renowned architectural practice, which specialises in sustainable design. In 2010, Troppo received the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture from the Expo Citè de l’architecture in Paris. Troppo Architects have offices in Darwin, Adelaide, Perth, Byron Bay and Townsville. All the offices work together collaboratively across a range of community, commercial, housing and urban design projects, developing key ideas and principles for sustainability. Geoff is a director of the Townsville office, and has worked on projects as diverse as a Cape York ‘dunny’ to city masterplans. Geoff is also a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture & Design at the University of Tasmania and is part of the Urban Design Collaboration with the Launceston City Council and the Office of the State Architect. Geoff’s other business adventures include being the Director of a building company, an earth moving company and, until recently, a Skydiving operation.

Creativity is the ability or level of ability to identify the opportunities, both individually and in combination, which lie between the necessities or constraints of a particular design problem—and then being able to exploit those opportunities for the betterment of the project.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Creativity presents itself in architecture through the development of built responses to design problems that successfully address issues that must be resolved, but then finds the opportunities in a problem that can allow the consideration and development of aspects of the project that should be resolved, or, could be resolved. Must—e.g. keep rain out, provide for physical comfort, secure belongings. Should—e.g. consume less energy, only use renewable resources, be economical. Could—e.g. facilitate social interaction, encourage self-determination, provide for non-users. Issues that fall into the categories of should or could tend to be subjective and so cannot be judged by an individual. The identification and exploitation of the individual possibility or range of possibilities can however be judged.

What role does creativity play in design? By the above definition creativity and design are in essence one and the same since creativity requires that the essential things are dealt with primarily, but creativity also requires that non-essential or aspirational issues are considered and included. The level of creativity might then be thought of as the degree to which non-essential or aspirational issues are included, but only after essential issues are dealt with. The truly creative solution does not come at the expense of the essential aspects of the design. It works between and builds on these to the mutual benefit of both the essential and the aspirational.

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What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative?

Geoff Clark

The products of a designer’s actions are creative when they address the essential, but also find room to consider and address the advisable.

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The products of a designer’s actions are creative when they address the essential, but also find room to consider and address the advisable. The more creative designer will also find opportunity to address the desirable.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Creativity can be assessed to a degree by ensuring that each of the above is not only addressed and articulated in a design solution, but that each is addressed and then tested against the designer’s stated aspirations. Additionally, creativity can be more finely assessed by determining whether the designer has exhibited the capacity to identify a range of possible solutions to the essential, the advisable and the desirable, and has carefully chosen from these options. In this way, assessments of creativity can be undertaken in a deliberate manner, without the need for subjective judgements.

Ian Clayton the university of tasmania

What is ‘creativity’? Creativity is specialised ability to: Ian Clayton lectures in design communications, design studios and Learning-by-Making (LBM) studios at the University of Tasmania. These subjects service the disciplines of architecture, interior design, furniture design and landscape architecture. He has been teaching architecture for 30 years and has also taught at Queensland University of Technology, The University of Queensland and Singapore Polytechnic. Ian has, together with his colleague Robin Green, instigated and promoted the experiential learning within the School of Architecture at the University of Tasmania, in particular through the development of the LBM studios in 1994. LBM projects allow students to both design and make small projects for local and non-profit organisations, including bus stops, mobile homes, stage sets and experimental structures. Since LBM’s inception, experimental learning has pervaded all aspects of the school’s pedagogical approach in using full-scaled and different scale models to test, design and build. Ian has been a strong advocate of co-teaching

♦♦ think in many different ways so that the mind can make sense of complex relations of perception, experiences and values from personal and cultural perspectives; ♦♦ imagine and test possibilities of creating and creation, and use intellectual and physical skill to refine and define what is imagined into a coherent whole; What defines creativity is this coherent whole and how it is then perceived by others as valued, worthy and desired.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? In the discipline of architectural design education, as being quite different from professional architectural activity and outcomes, creativity includes inter-dependent activities such as: ♦♦ managing thinking and directing research in meaningful ways; ♦♦ generating ideas and concepts; ♦♦ developing ideas and concepts to compare value in multiple schemes; ♦♦ testing, refining, proposing and judging schemes; and ♦♦ appreciating design quality through action research, as distinct from reading about it. Words in italic form the basis for educational design studio practice. In this sense, the notion of a design studio is to progressively build design and design appreciation skills to an externally accredited level. The words in italic are also the basis for structuring practice sessions not unlike those of a drama class focussing on particular aspects of their craft. This is a useful comparison in that drama student productions are like design student scheme presentations—they only promise future expectations of value, worthiness and desire in a wild, real world.

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and mentoring academics in these teaching methods. For 15 years, he has also extended his interest in architectural education to working collaboratively with Tasmanian secondary colleges to develop and maintain a pre-tertiary subject entitled ‘Housing and Design’.

What role does creativity play in design? It is central. It is core. It is the foundation of teaching and learning practice as a lead into the final act. The final act always involves money and real judgement as distinct from academic assessment. Teachers are creative in devising studio programmes. Students are encouraged to practise creativity in their studio sessions. But these can only be judged on the parameters set by the teachers. In this sense, creative activity is a set of processes and is more like practising a craft. Thus creative activity cannot be compared to professional creativity where a highly skilled and artful mind conceives of and manages the production of a real thing. Beyond the university, design creativity is revered, valued and rewarded by experts, aficionados and the general public. So it is no wonder that creativity is such a hot topic. Putting it bluntly —without creativity, design could not exist.

What makes a person’s actions or the product of their actions creative? If a definition of creativity is the coherent whole and how it is perceived by others—as valued, worthy, and desired—a number of questions must be asked: The first question is: who are the others? If the others are … …experts—then it is simple; they are considered such because of their experience, valued judgement and guidance in what is good, valued and desired by community and culture. …academics—then it is not so simple; academics structure practise sessions around the final realisation of creative acts. Some, though very few, are considered experts in the field, and of these, few are experts in controlling practise sessions. …the public—then it is simple; the public through political and collective processes are the ultimate judges. The problem here is time, as it may take considerable time for final judgements to take effect. Good design lives forever and becomes iconic, loved and protected and part of culture, whereas not-so-good design slowly dies, or in some cases, is publically vilified and destroyed.

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The second question is: on what criteria are these judgements made?

Ian Clayton

Academic assessment and judgement practices should be, and often are, very different to real architectural assessment, which is based on experience of built works.

Experts use criteria based on highly informed, reliable and highly skilled practises, as well as abilities to communicate such. Academics use criteria that are often variable and based on personal approaches to teaching and learning, hence experts and the public are normally excluded from such processes. The public tend to use emotive and variable criteria mirroring the social and communal desires of the time, but not necessarily cognisant of a much longer time frame of value, worthiness and desire. The third question is: what makes a student’s activities and outcomes creative when controlled and judged by academics (rather than experts)? The problem is about defining the complex processes that have evolved to educate architectural designers to a base level, and the institutional procedures that relate to these processes. The base level is nationally controlled. So it is useful to think of student’s activities and outcomes as small bits of creative promise, rather than creativity being within a coherent whole of a built work. As time frames for developing creativity vary, academics can only claim bits of students’ work as exercises that express creative promise. Academics should be clearer about this.

Can creativity be assessed and, If so how? Yes, such small ‘bits’, as discrete practise processes, can and are assessed. This, however, depends on parameters and criteria being clear and understood by teachers and students. The work done at a university level is about practising and getting these ‘bits’ working individually, as distinct from the coherent whole of a built work. Hence, if academics apply real measures of architectural creativity the assessment becomes misleading. Academic assessment and judgement practices should be, and often are, very different to real architectural assessment, which is based on experience of built works. Outside this reality, the processes remain academic. This distinction is the basis for professional teaching and learning practices. The ‘bits’ that are assessed are the inter-dependent activities listed previously. The various activities listed under my second answer can be planned as discrete studio exercises, or introductions at the first year level. These can be assessed if they are described clearly within a design context, facilitated, and most importantly, competently taught—this is

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Ian Clayton

The big issues for academics are the ideas of ‘perceived promise’ and how these are described to students and assessed, and also that accreditation of architectural schools does not include a clear specification of competency in creativity.

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particularly critical for the first activity (managing thinking and directing research) as it is the most challenging. The standard procedure has been to progressively build practise of these activities and understanding of their interdependence, starting with two activities, and then three—working towards a student being able to juggle all of them at final year level. The big issues for academics are the ideas of ‘perceived promise’ and how these are described to students and assessed, and also that accreditation of architectural schools does not include a clear specification of competency in creativity.

Joanne Cys university of south australia

What is ‘creativity’?

Joanne Cys (FDIA) is Associate Professor in Interior Architecture at the University of South Australia and is currently the Acting Dean of Graduate Studies. In this role she is responsible for the strategic direction and effective performance of the University of South Australia’s Higher Degree by Research program. Joanne is also the National President of the Design Institute of Australia and is Australia’s representative to the Global Design Network (GDN) and the Asia Pacific Space Designers Association (APSDA). Joanne’s research is concentrated on the professional status and directions of design practice, continuing professional education for design practitioners and evidence-based design research. She has been invited to speak at international and national conferences, to curate design exhibitions and is a regularly invited contributor to design journals.

Creativity involves risk and experiment. Creativity is not tidy and predictable. In the words of Matt Adams from the artistic collective Blast Theory, creativity ‘is not a neat, sunny attribute like enthusiasm. It is often awkward, oppositional, disruptive and antagonistic’ (Adams 2004). Creativity is a type of mental agility that enables individuals to free themselves from conventional thinking and known processes in order to arrive at unique, often surprising, and to a greater or lesser extent, unprecedented responses. Over the last decade, creativity, along with innovation and collaboration, has become a key word for managers, politicians and bureaucrats alike. All areas of endeavour now place a high value on creativity, with the words ‘creativity’, ‘creative’ and even ‘creatives’ (i.e. those who are creative) in danger of becoming meaningless due to over-use. It is important for designers to recognise what they understand creativity to mean for their own discipline and to articulate it clearly.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Interior design is an outward looking, expansive discipline that originated out of transdisciplinary curiosity and unconventional spatial opportunity. As a developing and relatively unrestricted discipline, interior design is well suited to embrace multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary practices and it is here that creativity best presents itself in contemporary interior design practice. Interior design is at its most creative when it moves beyond conformity and into new realms. This is when thoughts, ideas and concepts become truly creative. To collaborate is to be willing to deliberately step beyond professional boundaries and engage in a new creative process that is influenced by collaborators from other design professions. Inherent in this process is the willingness of designers to take risks, to experiment and to venture into unfamiliar ground. Creative collaboration is often multidisciplinary. A multi-disciplinary collaborative design process requires designers to recognise, understand and practice a new way of designing that is not necessarily their own. In successful collaborations the designed outcomes will reflect this process by embodying the extension of skills beyond the collaborators’ individual disciplines. The project as a whole

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A deliberate intent to experiment and a willingness to take risks and embrace the unknown makes for creative actions and outcomes.

will demonstrate multiple authorship through creativity, cohesion and consistency that is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

What role does creativity play in design? It has been said that ‘design is what links creativity and innovation [...] design may be described as creativity deployed to a specific end’ (Cox 2005). Creativity is the professional currency of design. It is one of the distinguishing attributes or skills that identifies a designer from the myriad of other consulting services clamouring to solve problems and offer expertise in our service economy. But creativity has another role in design; design can encourage its users to be creative in their own right. Design practice can contribute to the creativity of a place generally. Designers create the environments we inhabit, the interior spaces we occupy, the objects and products we use, and the graphic imagery and media we interpret. We are all more likely to operate creatively if we are surrounded by environments and products that are deliberately conceived to inspire and encourage creativity, regardless of the area of activity.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? A deliberate intent to experiment and a willingness to take risks and embrace the unknown makes for creative actions and outcomes. Creativity is not assured. It must be sustained and renewed. Nourishing creativity, whether at the beginning, middle or near the end of a life in practice, requires more than keeping up to date with products and processes and scanning the latest issues of design journals. It requires reflection and can be quite idiosyncratic. For some, creative sustenance may come from research through experimental and conceptual design explorations beyond the normal constraints of time and budget. Whilst for others, it may be derived by engaging with contemporary culture through film, art, literature or travel. One of the most immediate and potent means of inspiring and invigorating creativity is discussion. Engagement in discussion, dialogue, discourse and even debate provides us with an opportunity to influence and be influenced, to strengthen our position or shift it, to gain knowledge and also to disseminate it. The moment this discussion starts to get interesting is when it moves beyond the predictable conversations. When debate occurs at the boundaries of the practice we know so well and draws our

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thinking into new realms where ideas, and hence creativity, move toward a sharper edge.

Joanne Cys

Creativity, especially the creativity that arises out of collaboration is not always easy to identify. It is therefore just as difficult to measure or assess as it is to plan for.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Creativity, especially the creativity that arises out of collaboration is not always easy to identify. It is therefore just as difficult to measure or assess as it is to plan for. Herein perhaps is the most useful approach to assessing creativity: to consider intent equally alongside outcome and evaluate how innovative or experimental the outcome of the creative process is in relation to the innovative or experimental intent of the process itself. Possible criteria for assessing creativity may question whether risks were taken in the design process and how they affected the outcome, how the experimental nature of the concept design was manifest in the outcome, and whether the experimental nature of the research phase of the project influenced the outcome.

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Barbara de la Harpe rmit university

What is ‘creativity’?

Associate Professor Barbara de la Harpe gained her PhD in Educational Psychology from Curtin University in 1998. She is today working in the Design and Social Context Office of RMIT University, where she is the Deputy PVC, Teaching and Learning. She has published extensively in the area of learning, change management and higher education pedagogy.

Creativity is coming up with something new or different—generating unique approaches and solutions to issues, problems or opportunities. It is an ability or cognitive capacity, often referred to as ‘thinking outside the square or box’, that allows an individual to see, do or produce things in a new or different way. This ability results in actions, or the products of actions, that are creative; for example an innovative way of thinking (thought), or a way of doing something or approaching a task (process) or artefact (product). These can be communicated through a new idea, a new expression through the senses (body, sound, taste, sight) and/or a new artwork etc. Either conscious or unconscious insight fuels this process. There are a plethora of definitions of creativity. It has, for example, been defined as ‘the experience of thinking, reacting, and working in an imaginative and idiosyncratic way which is characterized by a high degree of innovation and originality, divergent thinking, and risk taking’ (MAEA 2010).

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Creativity is presented in education disciplines through teachers coming up with creative ways to design curricula and to enact the design in the teaching and assessment process.

What role does creativity play in design? Creativity is core to design when new ways are needed. Otherwise the combination and use of existing practices to respond to issues/briefs is equally appropriate and valuable.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? A person’s actions are creative when the actions or the products of their actions are new or different and the person is aware of this new or different way of thinking, seeing, doing, making etc.

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Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Yes, creativity can be assessed. It requires that the elements of creativity be clearly explicated and then rubrics developed. It requires the inclusion of an ‘other’ or ‘magic’ element/factor, to recognise and acknowledge outcomes that transcend the tangible and may at times be hard to articulate in words, to describe or to touch, etc. It also requires descriptive models of work across the range of high distinction, distinction, credit, pass, and fail. Here, the combination of practice and feedback is critical (see for example Lindström 2006).

Barbara de la Harpe

A person’s actions are creative when the actions or the products of their actions are new or different and the person is aware of this new or different way of thinking, seeing, doing, making etc.

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Halime Demirkan bilkent university

What is ‘creativity’? Since creativity has a complex nature, there is no single definition that fully encompasses the concept. Today, the widely accepted view is that Halime Demirkan is a Professor creativity is a process of the mind. Therefore, creativity cannot be analysed of Architecture in the Faculty of as a deliberate process, since the intuitive qualities are also influential. Art, Design and Architecture at There are researchers that concentrate on the differences between the Bilkent University. She holds a Bachelor and Masters degree in perceptual functioning of individuals in order to determine the diversities industrial engineering and a PhD observed in creativity levels. Although the visual sense of individuals is in architecture from the Middle the strongest influence on the way we perceive the world, the other senses East Technical University. Her are also active in visual thinking. As a result of the diverse perceptual previous professional experience abilities, different types of products are created. Following these products has included appointments as research assistant and instructor and evidences of creativity, comes the need to conform to values of society in the departments of Industrial or culture. Assessment of creativity is subsequently an important issue, Engineering and Industrial since it is difficult to judge something that is ahead of its time in a specific Design, Middle East Technical environment. Therefore, creativity is not only a personality trait—the University; and as a researcher creative process and the creative product inside a creative environment are at the Building Research all the essential components of creativity. Institute, Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline?

She has published articles in various journals such as: Creativity Research Journal, Journal of Creative Behavior, Design Studies, Applied Ergonomics, Learning & Instruction, Journal of Engineering Design, Optics & Laser Technology. Her current research and teaching include creativity in architectural design process, design education and human factors in design.

Creativity, as a natural component of architectural design process, has often been characterised by the occurrence of an event called the ‘creative leap’ that can be explained as the bridge between the problem and solution space. The cognitive processes observed in design closely resemble the processes in traditional creative fields such as music, writing, painting and sculpture. Mental imagery and external representation are implicit parts of the stages of creative process. During a design process, the primitive thought that is externalised begins a continuous cycle of repetitions of imagery and representation until, at one point, the designer decides to draw sketches. Sketches and visualising the reality created are significant skills for designers that aid external representation.

What role does creativity play in design? Creativity in design process involves originality, sensitivity, self-courage and identification in design process. Originality in the design process

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Originality in the design process involves easily defining the problem, use of different materials, tools and media, and thinking out of the boundaries of traditional problem solving processes.

involves easily defining the problem, use of different materials, tools and media, and thinking out of the boundaries of traditional problem solving processes. Sensitivity has characteristics such as fully reacting to experience in thought and feeling, and showing increasing awareness in the environment while working. Self-courage consists of characteristics such as being independent of others in decisions, or freely and easily transferring thoughts onto the design task. Identification involves items such as being connected to the design task and reflecting this with gestures while working.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? In the design process, the most distinctive actions of a creative designer can be expressed as ‘behavioural flexibility’ (Demirkan & Hasirci 2009). This involves three factors, which are related to assessment of creative characteristics, traits and behaviours of the designer in dealing with the task. These three factors can be ordered hierarchically and include: (1) the completion of the design task; (2) being sensitive to the environment in terms of social, physical, perceptual and emotional terms; and, (3) originality in approaching the design as a problem solving activity. The second group of actions can be described as ‘emotional variability’, which also involves three hierarchical factors; namely, negativity, control and isolation. Negativity has the highest priority. It refers to unconstructive characteristics that are found in individuals during the creative process, such as being annoying or totally ignorant of others in the same environment. Control is the second item. It refers to nondefensiveness and stability. These characteristics are not considered as creative behaviour and have a negative correlation with creativity. Isolation is the third item. It is a characteristic of an individual who works alone and in an uncooperative manner. The third group of actions is characterised as ‘risk taking’ and involves two factors: self-courage and humour. Self-courageous individuals are self sufficient, emotionally mature, able to cope with stress, willing to take risks and self-centred. Humorous individuals are the ones that make use of the environment and are playful in accomplishing the task. The following characteristics are ranked in importance for creative design products (Demirkan & Hasirci 2009): elaboration is a quality of a product that has been designed with attention to details; fluency

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The interaction between creative person, creative process and creative product inside a creative environment should be considered as a total act in assessing creativity.

shows that the project solution is quick, smooth and natural as opposed to difficult and painful; novelty depicts the quality of something being new and unusual for the individual; open-endedness shows the quality of the task as not being limited, showing progress and evolving creativity; value includes certain external standards that may directly relate to the problem; originality involves a product that has fresh, authentic and unusual ideas and precedes other products; flexibility shows that the project is being responsive to change and adaptable to changing situations; redefinition is the reinterpretation of the given problem in an original way; appropriateness involves the extent to which the solution content of the problem answers the needs of the user in terms of function and aesthetics. All these items are the components of ‘creative products’.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? The interaction between creative person, creative process and creative product inside a creative environment should be considered as a total act in assessing creativity. Assessment can be used for examining the relationship between ratings of the components of creativity. Observation, protocol analysis and rating scales can be used as tools in assessment. While observation must be utilised during the creative design process undertaken by the creative person and person, the latter two can be carried out following the task. The person part of the observation sheet should consist of originality, completion, self-courage, sensitivity, negativity, isolation, control, and humour components. The assessment of the process part should consist of originality, completion, selfcourage, sensitivity, negativity, identification, and movement components. Particular behavioural items should define each stated component. Videotaping technique also aids in obtaining any extra information that may be helpful to the creativity study. Either think-aloud or the retrospective protocol analysis method is reliable and common in analysis of creative processes. As it is difficult to understand the nature of imagery process through observation, the protocol analysis system should also be used in creativity assessment. Retrospective protocol analysis is considered a very reliable method and is used extensively in the investigation of imagery across various fields. Rating scales can be used for assessing product creativity. Experts in the field can assess characteristics of product creativity based on the following

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Halime Demirkan

Particular behavioural items should define each stated component. Videotaping technique also aids in obtaining any extra information that may be helpful to the creativity study.

items: value, appropriateness, flexibility, fluency, novelty, originality, elaboration, redefinition, ability to answer needs, open-endedness and evolution. The assessment can be done on a five-point scale (e.g. poor, poor–average, average, average–excellent, excellent).

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Arne Dietrich american university of beirut

What is ‘creativity’?

Arne Dietrich is Professor of Psychology at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Georgia, USA. Arne has done research on the higher cognitive functions supported by the prefrontal cortex, focusing on the neural mechanisms of: (1) creativity; (2) altered states of consciousness; and, (3) the psychological effects of exercise. Arne’s major publications include a new framework for the neural basis of creativity (Dietrich 2004), a comprehensive review article of neuroscientific studies of creativity (Dietrich & Kanso 2010), a new mechanistic theory of altered states of consciousness—the transient hypofrontality theory (Dietrich 2003, 2004b), and the proposal of two new explanations for the effects of exercise on emotion and cognition (Dietrich 2006). He is also the author of a textbook on consciousness (Dietrich 2007). Arne has given numerous invited lectures around the world and his research has been featured prominently in the international press.

As with all thorny questions, there is a short answer and a long one. The short answer is this: ‘dunno!’ The long answer is not, as one might hope, an improvement on the short one, nor in proper academese for that matter. Yet here it goes: trying to define creativity is, in my view, a Sisyphean task and all existing definitions should be treated like nuclear waste; that is, buried for a million years. They are either hopelessly nebulous or demonstratively misleading, or both. As for nebulous, you do not need your brain to run on all cylinders to see that the current flagwaving, sweeping generalisation passing for the canonical definition— something novel and useful—is such a broad, amorphous monster, that distilling some sort of half-exploitable operational definition, either for experimental work or for psychometric assessment, is a quixotic pursuit. We might as well try to nail jelly to the wall. As for misleading, I invite you to look at any definition that attempts to tighten the screws on the matter. Open any source, academic or otherwise, and you will find creativity linked with, say, low arousal, defocused attention, right brains, unconscious processes, flow states, intentional reasoning, lateral thinking, altered states of consciousness, or mental illness, to name but the most popular fizzers. Premature category formations like these have had the effect of causing the intellectual equivalent of a 7–10 split—a bowling reference to a set of pins that are still standing and are next to impossible to knock down with the second ball. Plus they all go bang anyway as soon as we ponder their opposites, all of which are, of course, also sources of creative thinking. Such artefacts of myopic theorising result, I believe, from the continual bad habit of treating creativity as a monolithic entity. Unless we partition creativity into different types, preferably along the lines of the neurocognitive processes involved in each, and distinguish different levels of evaluation (cognitive, social, etc), this wicked problem is an intractable one. If dodging the bullet like this sounds evasive, consider genetics, a field that has flourished for decades without a decent definition of the word ‘gene’. For the purpose of instructional scaffolding, I do, however, have a characterisation of creativity. Mind you, it is nebulous, but that is better,

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In my case, this question becomes: how does creativity presents itself in creativity? Creativity in the field of creativity is, I suppose, no different than creativity in any other scientific domain.

I think, than to wag the dog with a 7–10 split. Presuming we are talking about human creativity here, that is, the region of design space—the logical space containing all possible permutations of information—that we can navigate given the 3-pound heap of electrified biochemistry we come with, I can offer this conceptual boomerang: creativity is an up-move in design space where the vector of the move reaches local maxima in the topography that are at right angles to the current, preset disposition of the brain’s explicit information processing system. I said nebulous, didn’t I?

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? In my case, this question becomes: how does creativity presents itself in creativity? Creativity in the field of creativity is, I suppose, no different than creativity in any other scientific domain. Progress in neuroscience and psychology depends on advances in theory and experimental design. Creativity is vital to both.

What role does creativity play in design? In evolutionary theory—the bedrock on which to anchor any type of analysis of human creativity—concepts of design and designing, have different meanings than in the design disciplines represented by most contributors to this book. All ascending moves in design space result— by definitional fiat—in new designs, and the basic process of designing is the same in all cases: a bottom-up, variation-selection process. A key difference in biological evolution is that each step in a trajectory is actualised and must, in its own right, be a viable form. The basic move, in other words, is to generate-and-field-test. This simplest version of the Darwinian algorithm is the force behind all creativity in the biosphere. Brains have evolved a striking update to this method. Human designers can generate-and-hypothesis-test, which renders cultural evolution: (1) faster, by orders of magnitude; and, (2) capable of a different kind of design—one that necessitates impossible intermediates. These fancier Darwinian algorithms proliferate design options and if we want to understand the role creativity plays in the infosphere, we would do well to study the place where that happens, the brain. Seen from this perspective, we can contextualise the above question in the following manner. Mental scaffolding entails a multitude of very different cognitive processes—executive attention, perceptual organisation, a host of different memory processes, emulator operations, predictions and so on—all of which have been the subject of intensive study in the cognitive

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I have contended elsewhere that the development of more reliable and valid psychometric measures of creativity is perhaps the most pressing issue facing creativity research today.

neurosciences. On the basis of what we know about the brain, I have made a number of first-round proposals as to where, and how, creative steps might enter into the process. A straightforward one, for instance, is to start with the fundamental, constituent units of the design process and distinguish between the mental processes involved in the computation of ideational combinations on the one hand—the variation components— and those involved in their evaluation as creative on the other—the selection components. This mapping is possible for many cognitive processes and their neuroanatomical substrates already. Such a course of action allows us to ask ever more precise questions, for instance what role creativity plays at each stage of the design process. We can also ask what role creativity plays in design at the level of society, the ultimate selection level. Although these sorting processes are still based on evaluative judgements done by brains, additional cognitive processes come to the fore here, such as conformity, obedience, stereotypes and so on. Many designs are simply the result of common solutions to common design problems, the sort of thing most people tend to file away under the general heading of problem-solving. But creative steps during the design process, however defined, can drastically alter a design, with potentially enormous ramifications for the marketplace. Apart from functionality, creativity is perhaps the most important factor in design.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? I understand this question as a re-formulation of the first question.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? I have contended elsewhere that the development of more reliable and valid psychometric measures of creativity is perhaps the most pressing issue facing creativity research today. At the societal level (to what extent is a product creative?), we do have a decent assessment tool. It was introduced by Therese Amabile in the early 1980s and is called ‘the consensual method’. This technique can readily be used in educational settings. At the cognitive level (to what extent is a person creative?), however, we are way short. Although this is not a popular stance in some circles, instruments like the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, which is based on the divergent thinking paradigm, or the Remote Associates Test, which is based on the related construct of associative hierarchies, are theoretically incoherent. It is not a great surprise, then, that they have

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Arne Dietrich

In all honesty, can we really expect a test that asks you to imagine alternative uses of a brick to pick an Einstein from a certified public accountant?

little, if any, predictive value over and above IQ tests and/or personality inventories. In all honesty, can we really expect a test that asks you to imagine alternative uses of a brick to pick an Einstein from a certified public accountant? The road out of this cul-de-sac is, again, to abstain, however difficult, from the seductive urge to catch the beast in one fell swoop. The field of intelligence might prove to be an instructive model here. The success of psychometric tests of intelligence is rooted in the understanding that there is more than one kind. Although there is often a single, overall score, people vary widely on the subscores. The same is likely true for the ability to be creative.

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Ruth Dineen university of wales institute

What is ‘creativity’? Creativity refers to an attribute, a process, and an approach. Ruth Dineen is Head of the Department of Creative Communication at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. She is also Visiting Professor at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and Mainyang College of Art & Design in China. For the past decade, Ruth’s research and teaching has focussed on identifying and overcoming social, cultural and organisational barriers to a genuinely emancipatory education, one which transforms all participants. She has published widely on the subject and, in 2007, instigated an international conference on the theme ‘Creativity or Conformity: building cultures of creativity in higher education’. Following an action research project in China on teaching creativity and creative teaching, she organised a ‘Creativity in Education’ exhibition and seminar series in Chongqing and Wales. She is co-ordinating the establishment of a Welsh Centre for Creative Pedagogy. Her current research investigates the relationship between assessment

Central to my own teaching and research is the belief that creativity is a fundamental human attribute and the well-spring of personal growth. Unless thwarted, it provides the motivation for self-actualisation, for the development of our innate potential. It can manifest itself in all aspects of our lives. More pragmatically, within UK art and design education, there is a general consensus that creativity is a process producing an outcome that is both novel/original and appropriate/valuable. Creativity in this sense requires both divergent thinking, to ensure originality, and convergent thinking, to ensure appropriateness. Some years ago I asked a colleague what creativity was. Her powerful response gives life to the dry definition above: Creativity is imagination, fired by passion, underpinned by knowledge and skill. What is imagination? It is questioning, foolhardiness, a belief that you can actually move yourself to that new place; spirit, determination, and optimism. And passion? It means having an open mind, integrity and a courageous heart. Had her reply been shorter I would have seriously considered tattooing this life-affirming message across my forehead—it sums up all that I hold dear about design education.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Creativity within graphic communication presents itself through visual outcomes—print-based or electronic—which encourage the reader/ viewer to engage with the content. The purpose of graphic design is always to communicate, in order to inform, clarify, persuade, entertain or inspire. Creativity is also visible in the design process itself, revealed through a focus on making new connections/gaining new insights in order to solve the communication problem in an original way.

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and student motivation. Ruth recently received a Teaching Fellowship Award in recognition of her contribution to excellence in learning and teaching in Wales.

Creativity is not necessary for human communication—road signs or a punch in the nose provide proof of that—but creativity can energise and intensify communication through original approaches, novel uses of media or form, or unexpected treatment of content.

What role does creativity play in design? Creativity is essential to human progress, allowing us to find solutions to new problems. It encourages new connections and the type of ‘what if ’ thinking that produces true innovation. As such, it has a central role in design. However, there is a tendency, certainly in Europe and USA, to focus on originality over appropriateness. This tendency is driven by an emphasis on the individual and by the demands of consumerism. We prioritise novelty over tradition, using knowledge and history as a playful starting point for individual reinterpretation, with variable results in terms of functionality. The rather terse tone of that sentence can be explained by the fact that I am typing from an office in a modern building which provides inadequate ventilation and minimal light since the windows were treated purely as aesthetic elements. Clearly designers have an awareness of the functional context of any design outcome (i.e. does it work/does it solve the problem?), but the modernist tenet of form following function is perhaps more honoured in the breach than the observance (I really must move offices before this becomes a chronic condition).

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? Creativity requires a combination of originality and appropriateness/ fitness for purpose. The former is relatively easily recognised, the latter is more problematic since the social and cultural context within which the action or product is evaluated is not neutral. The attributes that encourage creative actions include open-mindedness, flexibility and courage.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? In one sense, yes. On the programmes I have been involved with, creativity is assessed by breadth of purposeful experimentation, or by quantity, originality and appropriateness of ideas. The resulting numerics

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Ruth Dineen

A more productive approach, and one which I am currently arguing for, would be to move to a collaborative and consensual form of evaluative dialogue, where students and assessors work in partnership.

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are, at best, crude indicators of the relative existence of creativity at one (uncontextualised) moment in time. From another perspective, no. Much of the creative process is internal, even unconscious, known to neither the creator nor the assessor. In addition, judgements about the creative outcome are affected by its social, cultural and economic context, by the relationship between the gatekeeper/assessor and the individual creator, and the social standing of both. Given this complexity, an objective, fixed assessment of creativity is difficult, probably impossible. A more important question is ‘why should we assess creativity?’ A major aspiration of design education is to develop the individual’s creativity. Research and experience suggests that formal assessment significantly inhibits this development, and limits student motivation and deep learning. It is something of an own-goal. A more productive approach, and one which I am currently arguing for, would be to move to a collaborative and consensual form of evaluative dialogue, where students and assessors work in partnership.

Peter Downton rmit university

What is ‘creativity’?

Peter Downton is Professor of Design Research at RMIT University. His left foot is slightly larger than his right, despite playing plenty of chess when younger. He did not pass year 12 at school. For a while he drove a Wolseley with failure-prone brakes. Then, in 1966 he was given his first SLR camera. He has taught over fifty studios in architecture and some in other design disciplines, and has supervised higher degree students in most corners of design in several institutions since 1973, when he also began working on AR(G)C-funded research. His doctorate has had significant birthdays and he has been publishing and researching for over forty years. He makes, photographs, and writes, has never lived longer than five months consecutively anywhere North of 37 degrees South, has never flown in a helicopter, and has lied in one of the above statements.

In the areas of scholarship with which I am concerned creativity appears to originate in the potent re-positioning of conceptual boundaries. Creativity entails extending the domains of ideas and practices by surprisingly moving the game, and the rules for its playing, onto an expanded or adjacent playing field. Or, it might arise from adjusting normative boundaries, selecting an unexpected way of representing or modelling the more-or-less given to undertake the production of the known in an alternative manner. That which is produced is understood as novel, although it may not be genuinely and entirely new, but fresh in the context, assembled in ways that are not expected, or offering unusual emphases compared to the conventional. New patterns are formed, the existing is disturbed. The bio I provided plays exactly these games—by including unexpected information that is normally suppressed and by making an admission. While that means it is different to the norm, does it attest to creativity, or is it just a bit batty? We do not regard all newness as creative—some is assessed as pointless newness for the sake of newness, not as a need in the circumstances. But the profoundly pointless is often delightful and deemed creative. How and where we bound ideas shapes our epistemologies. We classify, categorise and type in an effort to know, both formally and in our quotidian taxonomies. We subscribe to (possibly veiled) boundaries around the domains of our knowing. Leaping, penetrating or repositioning these boundaries is both a creative and an epistemological act. Objects are not necessarily the outcome of this creativity. Creativity in the sense of inventive, imaginative, etc., as used in the arts, is a term from the first half of the 20th Century. Although dictionaries indicate that in English, creativity was initially a 19th century word, preceded by ‘creative’ and ‘create’ by up to five centuries. If the earliest citations of words attest to the needs of a group of language users, then is creativity only a hundred, or were creative activities previously understood as something else—possibly inventiveness and cleverness? Etymologically the concept is originally rustic Latin concerning producing and growing, and also has a hint of an Early French and Spanish Creole to do with nourishing and

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Only sometimes are creativity and designing clearly connected. Much of designing is sensibly ordering the known in the service of the new and creative.

rearing. These ideas can, and should, be held firm in our conceptualising of the term to the extent that we are concerned with fostering it through education.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? As a doctoral supervisor, I wander across disciplines working with candidates whose research has noticeable disregard for disciplinary boundaries. Somewhere along their personal trajectory, they have mostly had formal education in architecture, interior or industrial design, landscape architecture, or fashion, and maybe other disciplines. They exemplify the process of creativity by playing at, and with, boundaries. They are required to be creative in the sense of producing new knowledge for their disciplines. Their success is examinable. In a Venn diagram of disciplinary boundaries, many of their activities could be mapped onto the overlaps and interstices; others might lie on different planes. These candidates are challenging, testing, and speculating by bringing ideas into new relationships. What role does creativity play in design? Only sometimes are creativity and designing clearly connected. Much of designing is sensibly ordering the known in the service of the new and creative. Designed things have to work, stay together, not fall down, serve their intended purposes, etc. It is possible to argue that when such requirements are exceeded, challenged and confronted, that high quality design begins; this is a realm for creativity. It is not scale dependent. Industrial design often throws up wildly creative ideas in the design of small things, while landscape architecture may produce the creative at the scale of urban or regional systems. The creativity we celebrate entails a sustained performance or production over a career as a designer. This does not belittle the single creative act, rather, in terms of students, it is an aspirational statement. Sustained creativity in designing and in designed things is also expected at all levels and scales as a mechanism for contributing to a creative whole. What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? This has been an introspective research question for me; I have scrutinised my own activities. I do not set out to ‘be creative’ but if, during the course of my designing, making or photographing, I produce some kind of newness, it appears to arise as almost a by-product of activities directed at other ends, not an overt (or even covert) attempt at creativity. If the activities are redescribed in a currently fashionable way, or if they are reduced to

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Peter Downton

Speediness seems often overvalued in attributions of creativity. Was Mozart, who was apparently rapidly inventive, more creative than slower coaches such as Mahler or Beethoven?

more molar units of behaviour, little more is understood. Creativity just seems to arise. Perhaps it results from unruly neurons or inherent modes of relating to the world. Students who have been judged successful increasingly have confidence that they will have another idea and are thus prepared to explore and exhibit greater creativity. It is often facilitated by a breadth of knowledge and skills that enable the transcendence or reconstruction of established boundaries. Sometimes too much knowledge ruins generalisation and hence playful newness. Speediness seems often overvalued in attributions of creativity. Was Mozart, who was apparently rapidly inventive, more creative than slower coaches such as Mahler or Beethoven? If product rather than process is valued, the means of achieving it does not matter. If urgent ideas under fire are required, or instant wit, then we value rapid creativity, but designing is not quite this desperate.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Examination of PhD candidates in architecture and design areas is centrally concerned with their creativity—have they produced new knowledge for their discipline? Assessment at this level is similar to any other form of design assessment. There is no definitive set of boxes to be ticked or scored unless the learning task was so tightly formed that creativity was stifled. Assessors draw on their own expertise, performing a complex evaluative act weighing a very large array of criteria moreor-less simultaneously, including their understanding of the extant knowledge in the field. Having been involved in four decades of design project assessments in different eras and environments encompassing differing values, techniques, and attitudes, I am endlessly surprised by the narrowness of the range of grades produced by any team conscientiously trying to arrive at a fair result. Some of this assessment rewards creativity, but not as an isolated quality. At a doctoral level the task is apparently simpler as it involves about a quarter of the people it takes to assess a completing undergraduate.

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Ernest Edmonds university of technology sydney

What is ‘creativity’?

Ernest Edmonds lives and works in Sydney, Australia. His art is in the constructivist tradition and he first used computers in his art practice in 1968. He has exhibited and performed throughout the world, from Moscow to Los Angeles. He has been an invited presenter in, for example, the UK, France, the USA, Australia, Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia. He has many publications in the fields of art, creativity and interaction. Since the 1970s, he has pioneered the development of practice-based research in art, systems and digital technology and has supervised and examined many PhDs in that area. He is currently Professor of Computation and Creative Media at the University of Technology Sydney where he runs the Creativity and Cognition Studios. He is Editor-in-Chief of Transactions in the MIT Press journal Leonardo. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, holds his archives as part of the National Archive of ComputerBased Art and Design.

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Being creative is more than having a new idea. First of all, we need to distinguish between an idea that is new to us and an idea that nobody has ever had before (what Margaret Boden (2004: 43) calls ‘personal creativity’ and ‘historical creativity’). Secondly, we need to consider whether the idea is any good. Most of us would not consider useless ideas as creative ones. Thirdly, it is important not to be confined to the notion that creative ideas must be creative solutions to specified problems. Very often the most creative ideas are ones that formulate a new problem or reformulate an old problem in a new way. Also, of course, the ‘idea’ is often in the form of an artefact: painting, building, symphony etc. So we might say that creativity is the formation of problems, solutions or artefacts that have value in some context and that are either new to ourselves (personally creative) or new to the world (historically creative).

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? In the digital arts, creativity manifests itself in new forms: new interaction paradigms, new interactive relationships, new interactive experiences etc. This is to be contrasted with new content in old forms, where an established structure and order is crafted with new data. So, for example, a new fine photograph of a landscape with the textbook tree in the foreground and the horizon at the golden mean and so on, would not be particularly creative. On the other hand, an interactive artwork in which the audience moves sand around in a tray and so influences sound and images generated by the work might be.

What role does creativity play in design? In the design of interactive artworks, creativity is central. It plays its strongest role at the conceptual stage when new interactive experience concepts are developed and concepts of new art forms emerge. It is also important in generating the specific problems that must be tackled in order to realise the concept as an artwork. Finally, as problems are met and solutions do not work, creativity is critical in re-defining the concept and/or the realisation in response to the constraints of reality.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative?

Ernest Edmonds

Creative people are more able to accept failure than average. They can take risks because they do not fear the consequences of, for example, proposing a silly idea.

One point is that preparation is important. It is unusual to have a creative idea without there having been significant gestation and background knowledge first. Whilst the idea itself might ‘come in a flash’, as if by luck, much work and time have to be devoted to enabling the luck. Another issue is the need to take risks. Creative people are more able to accept failure than average. They can take risks because they do not fear the consequences of, for example, proposing a silly idea. Research suggests that experiences early in life have quite an influence on an adult’s creativity. Having been nurtured in a safe environment in which reasonable risk is encouraged and in which failure is not punished gives an individual significant advantage when it comes to being creative.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Yes, it can. Which is not to say that it is easy. History eventually works out what were the important original creative ideas. Unfortunately, that can take quite some time. Both in art and in science we often find that important creative work is only recognised generations later than when it was done. More immediately, however, expert opinion can be a good judge. Experts at least know what else has been done. In terms of formal methods of assessment and evaluation, the consensus seems to be that we need to use multiple methods used over long periods of study; weeks, months or even years. Methods for assessing creativity tend to be time consuming and expensive if done properly. It is not good enough just to look at the result. We also need to understand the process undertaken, the paths followed, the dead ends encountered and, of course, the state of the relevant world in terms of what others have already achieved.

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Ranulph Glanville freelance academic

What is ‘creativity’?

Ranulph Glanville is an independent freelance academic, a professor of one sort or another at the Bartlett, University College London; the Royal College of Art London; Sint Lucas Architectuur Brussels and Gent; RMIT University Melbourne; as well as at The University of Newcastle (NSW). He has a diploma (largely based in his practice in experimental music) from the Architectural Association and PhDs in both cybernetics and human learning. In 2006 he was awarded a DSc in cybernetics and design. He has published close to 350 papers, and is involved in a large-scale publishing project that includes a selection of his papers (in 3 volumes). He teaches around the world and is President of the American Society for Cybernetics. He lives in Portsmouth, UK.

It is difficult and dangerous to talk about what creativity is (attempting to define it), but it is relatively easy to talk about how creativity might come about. Creativity is a quality of certain people who act to express a remarkable way of seeing. The expression is usually seen by others as having novelty. The quality of creativity may be attributed to the person and the action: it is a result of a remarkable way of seeing, as understood through the expression of this way of seeing. It is not a logical outcome of a situation, nor is it emergent (in the older sense) from that situation, and it is not a property of anything. The above is not a definition. It describes, I maintain, a necessary condition, but it is not yet sufficient. We may find examples we can fit to it, but would not like to connect to creativity. I do not know how to make it sufficient, and I am not sure I wish to. That said, I like Margaret Boden’s (2004) framing of creativity into that which is ‘personally’ creative’, that which is ‘historically creative’, and that which is ‘surprisingly creative’.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Either I have no discipline, or I have many. I am not sure that creativity presents itself differently in different fields, except in detail. By this I mean that creativity presents itself in any and all disciplines. I see no fundamental difference in how I find creativity in any of the subjects I meet. There are differences of medium (of expression): in design I see creativity in drawings, models, writing, presentation, spoken words, performance. I see it in conversation and in groups. But most of all, I see it in approach, in research, and in the faces of my students. I am inclined to see creativity everywhere.

What role does creativity play in design? I currently divide ‘design’ according to two approaches: the traditional approach, which I liken to a conversation held with the self through paper

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I believe creativity comes in the first place from seeing the world differently, each of us in our own way, and not being deadened by habit or applied uniformity.

and pencil, and in which Vitruvius’ notion of ‘delight’ is crucial; and a later approach in which engineers, having usurped the word design, try to make it ‘scientific’. The traditional approach is tied in with creativity, which is a necessary consequence of holding a conversation. But a conversation is always between at least two people (or two personae accommodated within one ‘mind’) and within a context (for instance, the context of conversation). Thus, wherever the traditional approach is used, creativity will be apparent, because a conversation necessarily leads to novelty, which is one form that creativity can be seen in.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? This is an ambiguous question. I hope I am answering the correct disambiguation. I believe creativity comes in the first place from seeing the world differently, each of us in our own way, and not being deadened by habit or applied uniformity. I do not know how or why some people have a lot of this quality, and others seem to have less. One way of increasing this quality in people involves learning to listen: metaphorically as well as literally. What I can keep in my mind is much less than what everyone can keep in mind, and is very much less than what we might take as existing in the context we are in. If we open up to what others (including the context) offer us, if we reduce the level of control we wish to impose on ‘that which is not us’ so that it no longer has to fit the patterns we live by, we can benefit from what ‘that which is not us’ offers us, and thus find novelty. Note, I am using a quasi realist way of speaking here for convenience and brevity: as a short-cut.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Creativity can be recognised as present through its expression, growing out of a way of seeing. I have always been surprised at the unanimity of this recognition reached in almost all critical panels I have been on, no matter how different in view, experience or interest members are. I estimate I have found about 90% agreement in such judgements, including the judgements concerning creativity.

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Ranulph Glanville

Creativity involves, by definition, stuff that is outside the box, the not yet defined, the inconceivable.

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I am disinclined to try a check-list approach. Creativity involves, by definition, stuff that is outside the box, the not yet defined, the inconceivable. I am not sure that any judgement of creativity in students will hold true after they have stopped being students. Context is particularly important.

Tom Heneghan tokyo university

What is ‘creativity’?

Tom Heneghan is a Professor of Architecture at Tokyo University of the Arts, and was formerly Chair of Architecture at The University of Sydney. He was born in London, England, graduated from the Architectural Association in 1975, and subsequently taught there as Unit Master from 1976 until 1990 when he was invited by Arata Isozaki to participate in ‘Art Polis’— an international programme of architectural works in Kumamoto, southern Japan—and he established his office, The Architecture Factory, in Tokyo. After completing his Kumamoto buildings, Heneghan was awarded the ‘Gakkai Shoh’, the most prestigious award of the Architectural Institute of Japan. In 2002, he received the National Award of the Japanese Government for Public Architecture. His works have been exhibited in the Japanese Pavilion at the 1996 Milan Triennale and in the Australian Pavilion at the 2008 Venice Biennale. He was chief investigator for a large Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant from 2007–10.

In all disciplines—architecture, literature, scientific discovery, etc.— ‘creativity’ generally emerges from divergence from the usual expectations, terms of reference, or ‘rules’ of the discipline. Since change influences our future, and the future of our society, we must insist that this divergence results in a positive (or at least neutral) outcome. Those which do not, must—regardless of ingenuity or artfulness—be excluded from the lauded guild of ‘the creative’. Creativity may be seen in its purest form in comedy—in some of the monologues of Billy Connolly or Edna Everage…or Cedric Price (the ‘positive outcome’ being laughter). The comedy of all three highlights unexpected links or patterns, and the divergence between things as they are usually perceived and their reality. Price’s architecture is founded on the same basis.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? I refer you to the chapter about Rome’s Campidoglio in James Ackerman’s book ‘The Architecture of Michelangelo’ (1961: 54–74). We like to assume that we are a species in constant, progressive evolution in all our abilities—an error that cannot survive a reading of Ackerman’s pages. Creativity in architecture has occasionally presented itself in works of the level of Michelangelo’s, but it very rarely does. Indeed, such works may perhaps be better considered outside of the category of architecture simply because they exceed—by such an extravagant degree—the level of creativity that we can expect from such a compromised discipline. There is ‘ultra-high level’, and there is ‘regular level’ creativity. Both are good. Indeed, there is space and necessity for ‘the regular’ since the mundane is a necessary foil for the extraordinary. Price (again, and as always) got it right when he insisted that architecture is not about ‘problem solving’ but is, instead, about ‘opportunity seizing’. But, since some projects offer more opportunities than others, it is in the nature of much of the regular work of the discipline that in seizing the opportunity to alleviate the problems, an architect creates an unprecedentedly positive outcome.

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What role does creativity play in design?

Tom Heneghan

The word ‘design’ is problematic. It is often understood to mean the ‘shaping’ or ‘styling’ of something. Formmaking is one aspect of a creative output, but I am uncomfortable if it is the primary aspect.

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The word ‘design’ is problematic. It is often understood to mean the ‘shaping’ or ‘styling’ of something. Form-making is one aspect of a creative output, but I am uncomfortable if it is the primary aspect. Computers are capable of generating innumerable possible forms, for final selection by the ‘designer’. Selection involves analysis, judgement and ‘taste’, but none of those necessarily involve creativity. Therefore, since ‘newness of form’ may be the core feature of a designed artefact, it seems to me that ‘design’ and ‘creativity’ are not necessarily linked. A ‘telling’ point is that there generally is understood to be a difference between the work of ‘a designer’ and the work of a painter or sculptor, which seems to be to do with the profundity and/or endurance of the work’s significance. In such a division, architecture seeks (and often deserves) a place in the camp of the artists.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? For each individual ‘creator’, creativity involves moving beyond what they have done before, and involves not replicating actions or products that they are aware have already been performed or already exist.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? It can, relatively easily, be assessed as being present or not. But, filtering it into different grades of creativity is very difficult (probably even counterproductive in design education) because the creativity of a work may be in its nuanced reticence or in its flamboyant exaggeration. The only viable assessment method is pass/fail.

Ben Hughes central saint martins college of art and design

What is ‘creativity’? Creativity is the capacity for the synthesis of something new, be that a physical thing, an idea, a piece of music… Ben Hughes trained as an industrial designer in the UK before moving abroad to work for consultancies in Taiwan and Australia. Since 1999, he has been Course Director of MA Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins. He has published more than 100 articles, chapters and conference papers in publications and conferences proceedings. He is a regular contributor to Blueprint and Modern Weekly. Since founding the Claystation organisation in 2003, he has helped to create over 20 interactive exhibitions in 5 countries with partners as diverse as Porter International, Blueprint, CABE, Designersblock, The Lighthouse, London Architecture Biennale, Grand Designs Live and National Museums of Scotland. As well as writing and research, Ben continues to practice design and consults on industrial design, brand and marketing for companies such as Herman Miller, Porter International, MTV, Unilever, GSK, KUJU and Costa.

If we accept that it does not involve being visited by a muse or other cosmic entity, then most definitions have it as thinking differently; thinking laterally; or making connections where previously they did not exist. Koestler’s notion of bisociation goes further in developing this idea, while at the same time warning against creativity for its own sake. Here the word suggests an aimless artistic endeavour rather than something useful and applicable. In line with this is the common practice of applying the ‘creative’ label to a person in a derogatory sense—implying a dreamer; someone with their head in the clouds who is incapable of pragmatic or sensible decisions. At the same time, though, it is recognised that creative thinking is crucial for all sorts of business, with the vast intangible ‘Creative Class’ (around 30% of the US workforce if you subscribe to Richard Florida’s (2002) definitions) regularly touted as the great saviour of our economy. How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Successful design is always the product of one creative process or another. The designer’s ability to subsequently edit or refine the outcomes of that process, however, is perhaps more important than the creative act itself. There is an abundance of poorly designed work in the world which might reasonably be described as creative.

What role does creativity play in design? Design is my discipline. It is crucial to this industry, but only when balanced with a pragmatic approach does it become really valuable to the overall process.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? If creativity is primarily about how one sees and reacts to the world, then it follows that its main influence is the way in which one’s synapses are wired.

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Ben Hughes

I believe that all disciplines are trying to engender creative thought in students, but the route to achieving this is not necessarily to teach and assess creativity per se.

You might be born with a predisposition to look at things in a certain way, or you might have developed it in response to certain circumstances— there is no way of knowing. Can creativity be induced? Maybe. Much has been written about the use of alcohol and other drugs by artists, poets and musicians to induce a creative state. However, while such effects might be powerful, they are unreliable and unlikely to be appropriate in many situations where structured creative thought is required. Without manipulating the brain’s activity chemically, the only other option is to put people in situations and environments which have a high probability to encourage creative development. There are many simple tools that encourage a lateral approach to specific problems and issues and these can increase in complexity until you get to something like TRIZ, which aims to be an all-encompassing creative methodology. Experience of different projects and the appraisal of their success or otherwise provides the best opportunity for learning a creative approach. Teaching creativity in isolation is probably not advisable.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Only in the most subjective sense. We employ the term ‘academic judgement’ as the catch-all which links our experience and understanding of the discipline to assess something that is ‘creative’. It would be problematic to introduce the word itself into assessment criteria because, as described above, creativity for its own sake is not necessarily of any great value. Creativity cannot be standardised to a sufficient extent to be effectively assessed. I believe that all disciplines are trying to engender creative thought in students, but the route to achieving this is not necessarily to teach and assess creativity per se. It is much better to teach the discipline in a way that allows some lateral movement and to employ open-ended problems where there are a multitude of potential solutions to explore.

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Sandra Kaji-O’Grady the university of sydney

What is ‘creativity’?

Sandra Kaji-O’Grady is Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney where she teaches architectural design and history. Her research concerns the transfer of ideas and techniques from other disciplines to architecture, with a particular focus on the 1970s. Sandra’s previous academic appointments have been at the University of Technology Sydney, The University of Melbourne and Deakin University. She is also an architectural critic and writes regularly for professional design journals. Sandra has exhibited her own work, using pianola scores and commercial paint samples, in Sydney and Singapore.

Creativity is always historically defined and understood—and thus, undefinable. Even in the positivist arena of cognitive science, the idea that one grand theory can account for all creative work is rejected (Wallace & Gruber 1989: 4). To see how dramatically ideas about creativity change, we can look at the 16th century Italians, for whom creativity and a restless quest for knowledge are tied to one of the four temperaments, to Melancholia and the spirit of Saturn (Wittkower 1963). In the 20th century we might refer to ‘aptitude’, but that hardly comes close to the Renaissance notion of creativity as an innate and compelling force of character fated by birth. Nevertheless, the question of aptitude or innate creativity is the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ for all educational programs in the so-called ‘creative industries’. The establishment of tertiary programs in the creative industries assumes that creativity can be taught and, in turn, measured—that it is not simply a gift or talent. Wallace and Gruber (1989: 5) suggest that, ‘[p]erhaps the question—Can creativity be measured?—is inappropriate. We might better ask: ‘should creativity be measured? What good will measurement do?’ Surveying similar studies, they note that ‘the quantitative approach to creativity necessarily forces the criterion level downward’ (Wallace & Gruber 1989: 6). They suggest that what might be more useful is to look at creative work—how it is sustained, recognised, what contribution it makes. Their conclusion is that creative work is purposeful and intended and unfolds new possibilities for human experience, but that does not necessarily give us any clues to how to elicit it, recognise it or measure it.

How does creativity present itself in architecture? Creativity in architecture is often presented in our discipline, as in others, as sudden insights had by uniquely gifted individuals leading to novel outcomes. It is presented in mythical and mysterious terms yet, at the same time, efforts are made in teaching creativity in discrete activities. We familiarise students with quite concrete processes that include: encouraging the risk of failure; embracing chance and accidents; playing with alternatives; introducing unfamiliar tactics or elements; establishing

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Creativity is equally the realm of the design subject, of history, professional practice, environmental studies or technology.

constraints that force inventiveness, etc. These efforts are coupled with work needed to get the kind of mastery over the field that makes it possible to be spontaneous and critical—work in history and theory subjects, work in communications and technology subjects. Creativity is equally the realm of the design subject, of history, professional practice, environmental studies or technology. Another way of putting the question might be ‘is there a common characteristic among great architects? And if we could find a common characteristic, is it useful?’ The common characteristic among the masters of modernism is that they are, with rare exceptions, white men of middle to high birth. Success in the profession has been clearly demonstrated to depend—historically—on the individual’s economic and social class, attendance at high status architecture schools and apprenticeship with master architects. Creative aptitude is a minor factor in success. So while in the field of creativity research it is now widely accepted that creativity is not a general trait, but that individuals may have verbal creativity, spatial creativity, visual creativity, etc., it seems to me that identifying spatial creativity might not necessarily lead to more creative students or practitioners. I would suggest that we have as much responsibility as educators to instil creative or entrepreneurial approaches to our student’s design of their professional careers as we do to foster creative approaches to design. A knowledge of creative financing and creative marketing are imperative.

What role does creativity play in design? Again, the role played by creativity in design is historical. Creative activity over the course of the past century has veered from the systematic solving of problems, to the importation of exotic forms from science and science fiction, to Coop Himmelblau’s auto-portraits executed by sketching with their eyes closed. It is widely assumed that the creative vision of architects—their artistic capacity—is necessarily compromised in order that the client’s economic or institutional power and aspirations are accurately represented. This assumption relies on an idealised vision of art, as existing, to quote Julian Stallybrass (2004: 1), ‘in a zone of freedom, set apart from mundane, everyday life, and from its rules and restrictions’. Many theorists from Boris Groys (2008) to Baudrillard (2005) have debunked this idea of artistic freedom. All artistic activity, including that of architecture, is now performed as ‘ready-mades’, everyday objects introduced to the space of art or put together out of the technical models

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Sandra Kaji-O’Grady

The historical and disciplinary backgrounds against which we work establish cultures of taste and conformity, against which creativity draws its power and traction.

of available architectural forms and materials. In this historical junction, creativity operates at the level of critique of the ready-made and an interrogation of categories of real and virtual. Creativity is to be elicited, not by freedom of constraint, but by the very opposite.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? It is the cultural context that recognises and constructs a person’s actions or the products of their actions as creative. Actions that we might consider ‘creative’ today—crumpling a piece of paper and calling it a building— would in previous centuries have been considered heresy or madness. The historical and disciplinary backgrounds against which we work establish cultures of taste and conformity, against which creativity draws its power and traction. In a sense, creativity is thus always negatively defined as an operation of mapping the familiar in order to leave it behind. It takes a sure knowledge of what has already been accepted as art or architecture, in order to make one’s trespass. Thus, education necessitates parallel studies in history and theory, along with the acquisition of techniques for critique, communication, transformation.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? This question is ambiguous, it could mean either: a. Can creativity in an individual be assessed? b. Can creativity in a process be assessed? c. Can creativity in a work/idea be assessed? a. Research on creativity has demonstrated that creativity cannot be assessed as a general trait. Indeed, creativity in one area has been shown to often come with a decline in capacity in another. Visual-spatial creativity, for example, has been revealed in several studies to be coupled with a predisposition to verbal difficulties, including dyslexia. So to this first question, no, creativity testing would need to be domain specific, and given that we would be testing adults, the results would reflect exposure to cultural influences, not innate ability. b. In the context of education, the creativity of the process is one that can reside equally with the educator in framing the project, as it does with the student. It is a scandal that many design teaching scenarios are little more than the preparation of an aspirational and space brief, without any

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formulation of accretive steps in the design process. These steps should enact processes of transformation of the familiar.

Sandra Kaji-O’Grady

Creativity in a work cannot be assessed without these three actors. It cannot be assessed by those outside the discipline using a set of universal check points.

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c. If we return to Wallace and Gruber’s (1989) definition of creative work as purposeful, intended and unfolding new possibilities for human experience, then the assessment relies on reference to two things outside of the work: authorial exegesis and existing possibilities or examples in the discipline. This is the function of the critique; which brings together the work, the author’s account of the work, and a group of experts with knowledge of the existing parameters of the discipline. Creativity in a work cannot be assessed without these three actors. It cannot be assessed by those outside the discipline using a set of universal check points.

Gini Lee Queensland university of technology

What is ‘creativity’?

Dr Gini Lee is a landscape architect and interior designer, and is Professor of Landscape Architecture at Queensland University of Technology. She is past Head of School at the University of South Australia where she was a researcher and lecturer in spatial interior design and cultural and critical landscape architecture studies. Her PhD investigates ways in which designed landscapes are incorporated into the cultural understandings of individuals and communities. Focusing on the arid environments of Australia, her multidisciplinary research into the water landscapes of remote territories contributes to the scientific, cultural and indigenous understanding and management strategies for fragile landscapes. She is a registered landscape architect, Executive Editor of the IDEA Journal and a member of the Queensland Heritage Council.

An often overused and underdeveloped term, creativity is nonetheless brought forward as a useful ‘grab bag’ of concepts to describe thought and action attributed as novel, or as a way forward in shifting the status quo. It is often framed as a call to ‘unlock your creativity’, which assumes something fundamentally marvellous will result from drawing something out—often from nothing or from deep within—to produce a new entity. Creativity infers engagement with the imagination. Subsequently, creative people are simultaneously admired and feared. Creative outcomes take time to process, are frequently misunderstood and only occasionally cause some fundamental improvement or change. Creativity has recently developed its own politico/cultural class system where innovation and new thinking have become the panacea to dysfunction and economic malaise. For me, creativity is a shift in perception, sometimes a shift in behaviour, and a useful concept that enables imagining, and working with complexity in the world as currently experienced. Creativity is explorative and tangential to what is known—not about seeking the unknown to find new and original platforms for activity, but rather to reprocess existing knowledge to uncover the potential in what is with us already. It also consorts variously with such concepts as originality, imagination, inspiration, ingenuity, inventiveness, resourcefulness and vision.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Applied across disciplines such as landscape architecture, interior design, visual communication, curation and exhibition design, the most creative act is often strategic. It moves beyond a single disciplinary construct to engage various fields of endeavour that may embrace design and its associates; ecology, culture, construction and philosophy to name a few. As such, creativity enables various languages to emerge in the pursuit of something to do with a particular issue or condition that can be acted upon. True creativity may simply be about reinventing the wheel: firstly, adopt the wheel as the original model, then make space for a shift to

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Every design (or designer) operates on the idea that creativity is at the core of its inception (or his/her modus operandi).

occur through conversation with others: propose a new post-produced wheel if absolutely necessary, see if it flies as an idea, work towards its dissemination as appropriate, and start over again to see if the post-wheel can be improved upon.

What role does creativity play in design? It firstly operates as an assumption. Every design (or designer) operates on the idea that creativity is at the core of its inception (or his/her modus operandi). Questioning creativity’s role is potentially more problematic as it is only one aspect of the kit of parts that contribute to design. At the very least, assuming that creativity infers some emergent process toward an outcome that was not already present in the field, creative acts situate optimism as fundamental to developing a design ethos. Secondly, affective creativity works to support relational thinking across domains and disciplines. Design action may therefore cycle around various expertise and approaches, histories and invention, ecologies and cultures, for as long as it takes.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? An audience is necessary since creativity only comes in to being when recognised by another, and a transaction takes place resulting in shifts or pauses in the everyday thoughts and lives of others. Through bringing something into being, a deeper awareness of the existence of things already present in the world occurs. And this requires imaginative acts to be revealed and the commonplace altered, even if only in a fragmentary and/or illusory moment.

Can creativity be assessed and if so, how? In the world of clients, universities and funding agencies there are many processes in place to assess creativity in order to make it a less illusory concept and therefore worthy of solid monetary support. In the desire to discover innovation, assessing creativity has become a useful tool to support identity building. Cities now vie to become creative cultural capitals to lure new opportunities and new people to town—an illusory idea in the reality of many places when the political and policy surface is suitably scratched. Possibly akin to wrestling with a column of smoke, such assessment methods that seek to quantify—under the guise of qualification—cause a good deal of creative output to be overlooked.

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Gini Lee

I actually do not know the answer to assessing creativity as I have a niggling sense that the idea of assessing creativity is oxymoronic to dealing with the desire for invention and the demonstration of ideas.

Truly creative works sometimes do not look creative to assessors, or they are deemed too creative, risky and unworkable. Often it is simply that for such works their time has yet to come. I actually do not know the answer to assessing creativity as I have a niggling sense that the idea of assessing creativity is oxymoronic to dealing with the desire for invention and the demonstration of ideas. I am usually impressed when witness to something that brings attention to a condition I had not realised or experienced before, where my expectations are raised and where I look around at my students and colleagues and they are nodding in (sometimes rapt) agreement.

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Mirjana Lozanovska deakin university

What is ‘creativity’?

Dr. Mirjana Lozanovska is Senior Lecturer at Deakin University where she teaches design, history and research, and supervises design theses, honours and postgraduate research students. She has taught design studio since 1985. Her design teaching pedagogy has developed; firstly under the mentoring of Daryl Le Grew and the inspiration of Kerry Wise; in studio workshops nationally and internationally, including the International Summer School Program organised by the Faculty of Architecture, University of Saints Cyril and Methodius, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia; and through architectural practice and research work. Her publications on war and the reconstruction of the city, a study that began during her three-year appointment at the American University of Beirut, have resulted in international seminar invitations. Her expertise on identity, migration and architecture has international recognition, and she was recently invited as keynote speaker to an ESF Conference in Linköping, Sweden.

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Creativity can be related to the human capacity to make, but with more emphasis on the process of making and the way the thing made reveals this. Creativity can also be related to production or objects that involve beauty, innovation, pleasure and ideas beyond the functional, rational and economic. Creativity can thus be associated with the human subject and/ or the object produced. The subject and object of creativity are sometimes entwined, and often represented as symbiotic in relation to artists and artistic production. In the seminal text Keywords, Raymond Williams (1976: 76) explains the historical associations between the words ‘create’ and ‘creation’ and the ‘divine’; and later associations with the poet’s and the artist’s productions, leading eventually to the ‘creative arts’. However, the subject and object of creativity are not the same, as illustrated in the study of archaeological artefacts, where often the human subject (maker) is unknown. It is important they are not merged, and in this text I will try to respond to each part. Another sense of creativity in relation to making is drawn out in the writings of Gottfried Semper (1989), where the ‘knot’ made of a rope is described as a beginning of human civilisation—it was as relevant to beauty as it was to survival, need and technical progress. Most novel is how the knot is related to the plait in grooming and hairdressing with the suggestion that hairdressers were the original agents of human civilisation. Semper (1989) has called this techné, a combination of the vitality of making and a resultant aesthetics that is evident in traditional making and vernacular architecture—and perhaps is the reason we lament the loss of these practices. The object, whether this is material, such as a building, or immaterial, such as music, is perceived to transfer something of the creativity to the human subject that uses the building, or listens to the music. Creativity is related to the semiotic, a concept elaborated by psychoanalytic theorist, Julia Kristeva (1996). The semiotic defines the primary and primal processes associated with earliest childhood and the most basic drives, and is contrasted to the symbolic, which defines the world of

Individuals wanting to pursue creative practice need to become astute about the dynamic economic and social networks of society and how to best locate themselves within that.

institutionalised society—i.e. codified language, signs, law and order. Kristeva proposes that artistic practice can become a transformation of the unconscious as it allows for a creative and productive emergence of the semiotic within the structures of the symbolic field. Art becomes a powerful medium for this process of sublimation that addresses the repressive aspects of culture, and the individual’s own repressions. Every epoch promotes a particular understanding and set of practices of a word or idea, and creativity, like other fields, has historical contexts and a set of socio-economic forces that promote particular values of that society. Such contexts also produce and enable particular human subjects to engage in creative practice and be perceived as creative. Our current society promotes the idea that every individual is creative, a phenomena that is revealed in the prevalent ideas of community art, the moving gallery (poetry and images on the train), and local public art. Paradoxically, our current society is not known to give large funds to those people that pursue artistic practice in a serious and disciplined way. Individuals wanting to pursue creative practice need to become astute about the dynamic economic and social networks of society and how to best locate themselves within that.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? A famous image of Louis Kahn drawing with both hands on a blackboard epitomises one idea about what creativity is in architectural design because it testifies to the irrational dimension. There are several famous images of architects with pencil in hand, fully absorbed in the drawing/ painting etc. that is associated with this idea that creative production in architecture is a reflective but productive process, and a process that makes something appear that was not previously existent. However, this irrational dimension is founded on, formed and directed by several factors that are related to research, patience, skill, and an understanding of the role of architecture in relation to life—and not just to society and its structures. This is also expressed in Le Corbusier’s drawn symbol of Apollo and Medusa, illustrating not only that there is a tension between the rational and the irrational in the design process, but proposing that it is the careful preservation of that tension in the final production of architecture that touches the creative impulse of the people that use the building. Creativity in architecture can thus be both life-affirming and restorative.

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Some would argue that design teaching is too idealistic about the role of design in practice, arguing that other skills are needed for an architect to persevere to the completion of building construction.

In one chapter of The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries, Robin Evans (1995) makes some brief notes and footnotes about great architecture, and this can form a basis on which creativity in architecture has been identified. I have elaborated on these notes in another essay, but summarise the ideas below: Architecture, like the other arts, does not reflect ‘a culture in all its fullness’, but supplements ‘a culture’s incompleteness with a compensating image’ (Evans 1995: 44). This is very different to the idea that architecture reflects society and culture. In other words creativity in architecture appears as something in addition to the realities of that society. Architecture provides a moment of a ‘suspension of our disbelief in the ideal’ (Evans 1995: 43). It appears that Evans is suggesting that people do not believe in an ideal and perhaps know that such an objective is an illusion; yet despite that knowledge, society is held together by such a fiction. There is a gap between architecture as a mode of representation and what it represents, and this is expressed ‘as a numinous diffusion of all power’ (Evans 1995: 377). For example, the hierarchies of religion may be simply represented in religious architecture. But in the best of the architecture, it is the particular artistry and creativity of the architecture that has tended towards a momentary diffusion, rather than the expression of power structures. Through the complexity of transcribing the geometries of pure circles and spheres into structure, ornament, spatial order, interior and exterior articulation, architecture operates at levels of physicality that interweave symbolisation and abstract ideals. The conflicting relationship between the real and the ideal is thus held in balance in architecture through its particular materiality.

What role does creativity play in design? Creativity in design practice is not always the same as creativity in design teaching. Some would argue that design teaching is too idealistic about the role of design in practice, arguing that other skills are needed for an architect to persevere to the completion of building construction. This is true. Yet the role of teaching is also to introduce students to practices that offer more to society than the production of buildings, and not prevalent

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Mirjana Lozanovska

Architecture offers a dynamic relationship between materiality and things on the one hand, and socialisation and ideas on the other.

or dominant in our society. Teaching design studio for a long time (25 years) has illustrated that creativity in design involves the following: ♦♦ inspiration: opening doors to students that are about discovering the creative processes in making architecture. Students are vulnerable, and the teacher needs to guide carefully the courageous process of learning. ♦♦ processes of making and thinking: developing projects and briefs that engage the students in design methodology, and especially in the early years, in making as a dimension of design methodology. Risk-taking is seen as important in design, but the design teacher needs to find ways to enhance student confidence. Learning how to think, act and proceed is a guided process. These can involve set and constrained techniques (of making models, drawings), the media with which to make, ways of seeing, and providing frameworks for students to reflect on their work. Making is both a literal reference to physical making, using hands etc. associated with one interpretation of creativity, and a metaphoric reference to the processes of drawings and models (manual and digital), drawing the yet to be realised into appearance. ♦♦ production: the manifestation of making and thinking. Architecture offers a dynamic relationship between materiality and things on the one hand, and socialisation and ideas on the other. In its fundamental sense this is a relationship between objects and subjects, and in teaching creativity within design, the manifested objects are the key to the creative dimension at work. Thus processes have to involve products along the way—articulate and intelligent products that offer the student the possibility of making something better than they imagined, as a step toward design development. The creativity and skills of the design teacher to develop a pedagogical programme is vital for enabling students to engage with processes that may not always be rational, but involve discipline and commitment. Presently we are involved in a teaching project entitled HANDS–ON: Developing Structured Ways of Teaching Manual Processes in Design Studio, at the School of Architecture and Building at Deakin, which seeks to examine the role of making in the teaching of creativity in the early years of architectural education.

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What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? Such processes of constructing creativity involve socio-economic and cultural forces, as well as the histories from which they emerge.

We tend to know about creativity in architecture through publicity about and dissemination of the buildings and design approach of the architect, which means that a person’s creative actions are mediated by critics, historians, theorists and the architectural community. Moreover, such mediation is not merely interpretive. It can become productive and tend towards instrumentality by promoting particular modes of work as creative. Such processes of constructing creativity involve socio-economic and cultural forces, as well as the histories from which they emerge. Not only the architect as human subject, but the set of cultural fields and objects familiar to that subject, will influence their access and agency in relation to the construction of creativity. In his seminal book Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu (1984) explains the ways in which aesthetic taste gives appearance to a division of classes and is an instrument in the reproduction of that class division. Bourdieu’s (1984) theory attempts to reconcile the gap between the objective world of structures, products, systems, and the subjective world of the individual and choice. His analysis of taste reveals the entangled web between the objective and the subjective worlds: an individual is located within society through their objects; a person’s taste functions to correlate with an individual’s ‘sense of place’ and fit in society; but an individual is also born into an aesthetic tradition and setting; taste is internalised and embodied, and from his or her social origin, has specific access to particular social and educational fields. Such a social theory provides a powerful critique to the romantic ideas about creativity and to a strong genealogy of creative architects. Greatness or recognition as a master architect is not possible for most people, only a few in history attain such stature and this might have to do with a number of variables: work, talent, genius, foundation, labour, intensity of personality, ‘luck’, and socio-economic and cultural position. The creative architect is a cultivated figure. Images of the architect are indexical of the body as subject. Ideal images of the ‘master-architect’ are reproduced in the familiar photographs of the ‘hero’ of modernity or the ‘anti-hero’ of postmodernity, including images of Gropius and Le Corbusier, images of Frank Lloyd Wright with pencil in hand, the image of Gary Cooper as Howard Roark in ‘The Fountainhead’ (apropos Frank Lloyd Wright), the faces of Rolf Prix and Helmut

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Mirjana Lozanovska

The ideal image of the master architect is not the real image of an architect, it is the ‘mirror’ or the lens through which the real architect is seen.

Swyczinsky of Coop Himmelblau as the graphic trace for an urban design project. Private moments of inspiration and creativity of ‘master architects’ are casually, yet intentionally, caught by the camera and disseminated in the community. The body of the master architect is a determinate body and it permeates the architectural community at a level of identity and idealisation. The ideal image of the master architect is not the real image of an architect, it is the ‘mirror’ or the lens through which the real architect is seen. Nonetheless this image mediates each self-identity of an aspiring architect. It is important in architectural education that the spectrum of creativity both acknowledges the field outlined above, and extends toward other possible creative approaches, practices and techniques. While not all architects work in this way, only very few have challenged this image of the architect, for example Samuel Mockbee and the organisation Barefoot Architects in India. Their creative actions are to do with architecture of the everyday, certainly not without architects, but shifting the ideal of the master architect. I have developed this theory about the architect as human subject in essays, including, ‘Oumo Universale’ (Lozanovska 2009) and ‘Mistresses and Others’ (Lozanovska 2006). Similarly, the creativity of the resulting product is mediated by critics, historians and the architectural community. At a global level, a predominant Eurocentric narrative of architectural history casts an excessive hierarchy over what is valued as creative. This has impact on the choice of buildings deployed as references and in studies. One case in point is the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, which is often perceived to be one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Despite the contemporary interest in spatiality, interiority and surface in architecture, Hagia Sofia has rarely been the focus of architectural theory and critical analysis outside of the specialised forums of Early-Christian, Late-Roman and Byzantine art and architecture. A study of Hagia Sofia exposes a bias in architectural historiography towards Renaissance churches built 1000 years later. Most historians, and most practicing architects, have unwittingly marginalised this building in relation to the more privileged architecture of the Renaissance. A spectrum of hierarchies in historiography and politics arises that impact in various ways on the evaluation and interest of contemporary architecture, and whether it is perceived to be creative.

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Mirjana Lozanovska

Presumably, art and architectural education, as well as dance, music, writing education, has existed and has undergone processes of assessment for a very long time.

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Undoubtedly architectural education participates in the cultural capital of creativity. However, it is important that the field of objects is not merely a regurgitation of those that dominate the architectural media. In addition, it is important that students are encouraged to interact with objects through analysis and through design methodology. It has been illustrated that design exercises that involve the definition and application of an architect’s design methodology can produce creative results. While the disciplined practices of precedent, observation and analysis are central in the architectural community, there is a strong myth that creativity is a result of original and individual talent.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Presumably, art and architectural education, as well as dance, music, writing education, has existed and has undergone processes of assessment for a very long time. This makes this question a curious and intriguing one, and one that needs to be contextualised in our current social and educational parameters. Very rarely have I experienced in 25 years of teaching any major discrepancy in the assessment of design projects, and these have always included the assessment of their creative dimension. A paired question emerges: has ‘creativity’ in these disciplines transformed so that it can no longer be assessed in the ways it has been so far, or has the institutional and bureaucratic contexts in which these disciplines exist transformed so that ways that creativity was assessed is perceived to be no longer correct, adequate or part of the agenda of current education? The use of phrases such as ‘contentious issues’, ‘lack of the unambiguous’ and ‘to develop a common’ in the brief for this book gives some hints towards the second context. I think our current society has very little tolerance for creativity and people engaged with the teaching and learning of creative making— partly because it has to accommodate an aggressive bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is more about accountability in relation to legal consequences than pedagogy in particular. It would thus be important that in this project about assessing creativity we do not by default diminish the place and role of creativity in teaching design and in society via a very severe model of assessment. Intelligence and creativity is also about having insight into the repressive potential of both measuring everything, and believing in the exactness and universality of measurement.

Mary Lou Maher university of sydney, university of maryland

What is ‘creativity’?

Mary Lou Maher is Honorary Professor of Design Computing at the University of Sydney and a Senior Research Scientist in the iSchool and HCILab at the University of Maryland. She was recently a Program Director in the Information and Intelligent Systems Division at the National Science Foundation in the USA, where she initiated a funding emphasis called CreativeIT. While at the University of Sydney, she established a new degree program: Bachelor of Design Computing, in which computing subjects are learned in design studio-style environments that encourage creativity. Her research includes the development of cognitive and computational models of design and their evaluation through empirical studies of new technologies to support design and enhance creativity of individuals, teams and largescale collective intelligence.

Creativity is the ability to transform an existing conceptual space in such a way that produces a design that we have not encountered before, and redefines our expectations for designs within that space. Designers explore possibilities within a generalised conceptual space, where the boundaries and elements of the conceptual space are derived and adapted from existing designs. A creative design is more than just another design within that space: a creative design causes us to reconceptualise.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? In engineering and architectural design, creativity presents itself as designs that are not easily described using well-known performance and geometric attributes. A creative design may introduce a new set of performance attributes or contribute a new type of form. The Sydney Opera House introduced new expectations for the design of future opera houses by creating a symbol of the city of Sydney as well as a place for musical performances. The Sydney Opera House also provided a template for a series of similar designs based on the unusual geometry of the roof. This example shows that not only is a creative design new with respect to what we have seen in the past, it creates new ideas that are the basis for what we see in the future. While it is easier to demonstrate what is creative by describing designs that are highly creative across all aspects of the design, there are also many examples of creativity that represent relatively small changes in the conceptual space. For example, the Preserve company (preserve.com) has developed a toothbrush that exemplifies cradle-to-cradle design by selling the toothbrush in a package that you use to send your old toothbrush back by mail, so that the materials of their toothbrush products can be reused. The toothbrush does not serve new purposes or look significantly different, yet it has changed our expectations for the requirements of cradle-to-cradle design by including a return feature that makes it easy for people to recycle.

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What role does creativity play in design? While most researchers agree that novelty and usefulness are characteristic of creativity, I contend that there are three essential characteristics of creative products: novelty, value, and surprise.

Creativity is highly valued in design: many designers aspire to be creative for recognition and reward. The complement of creative design is routine design. In routine design, the product satisfies the requirements and specifications, and while it may be novel, it can easily be described using features of similar designs. Routine design is valued in engineering design because creativity may introduce unwanted risk. So while creativity is also valued, there are many situations in which a creative design would be too costly. Creativity in architecture and engineering plays the role of change and renewal. Creative designs change our expectations and create new possibilities.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? While most researchers agree that novelty and usefulness are characteristic of creativity, I contend that there are three essential characteristics of creative products: novelty, value, and surprise. Novelty is a measure of how different the product is from known products in its class. Generally, products are put in a class according to their label or function, for example a chair or a car. Members of a class are similar across their range of attributes and vary according to the values of the attributes. Novelty is recognised when a new attribute is encountered in a potentially creative product, a previously unknown value for an attribute is added, or a sufficiently different combination of attributes is encountered. Value is a measure of how the potentially creative product compares to other products in its class in utility, performance or attractiveness. Often this is a measure of how the product is valued by the experts for this class of product and is either a weighted sum of performance attributes or is a reflection of the acceptance of this product by society. To distinguish this from novelty, value is a measure of the product’s performance rather than a measure of how the product’s description differs from other products in its class. Surprise has to do with the recent past and how we develop expectations for the next new product in a class. This is distinguished from novelty because it is based on tracking the progression of one or more features in a class of products, and changing the expected next difference. The amount of difference is not dominant as it is in novelty, but rather it is the variation from expectation that is dominant.

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Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how?

Mary Lou Mahler

Novelty can be considered a measure of the distance between the potentially creative product and the known products in the class.

Assessing creativity in educational settings is similar to evaluating creativity in a professional setting. Creativity is currently best assessed by a group of peers or experts in the field of the creative act. This assessment is subjective, and possibly biased, but for now this assessment is the current practice for evaluating a creative act. However, it may be possible to formalise the assessment of creativity by clarifying what we mean by novelty, value, and surprise, and therefore provide a common basis for human evaluation and the potential to define algorithms that can assist in the assessment. Novelty can be considered a measure of the distance between the potentially creative product and the known products in the class. Since products can be described by a potentially large number of attributes and can be distributed throughout a conceptual space, one way of determining novelty is to use clustering approaches and then see where the potentially creative product is with respect to known clusters. When the design does not fall within some threshold distance to a known cluster, it is considered novel. The value of a product is often judged by criteria that are established by the requirements and performance attributes associated with the class of products or a specific design brief. The value can be expressed as a function of the weighted sum of the performance variables of the product. The difficulty with this approach is that often a creative product will change our value system and introduce new performance and descriptive variables, and the function associated with assessing value should allow the performance variables to change in response to the potentially creative product. One way to achieve this algorithmically is to use a co-evolutionary algorithm in which the fitness function (performance evaluation) changes in response to the current set of potential solutions. A product is considered surprising when we recognise a pattern in known products, and the potentially creative product does not follow the expected next product in the pattern. An ordered set of known products establishes expectations for new products in that class. A major difference between evaluating novelty and expectation is the sequential nature of expectation. Surprise is achieved by setting up expectations over a period of time or over a sequence of designs. Novelty can be measured without considering the sequence in which the products are generated or experienced. While

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Mary Lou Mahler

While surprise may be considered a kind of novelty, measuring surprise is distinct in requiring that expectations be established in a sequence of events or acts, and when those expectations are not met we are surprised.

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surprise may be considered a kind of novelty, measuring surprise is distinct in requiring that expectations be established in a sequence of events or acts, and when those expectations are not met we are surprised. Algorithmically, we could develop a pattern-matching algorithm for establishing expectations, such as a neural network, and then see when a new design does not meet expectations.

Harry Margalit university of new south wales

What is ‘creativity’?

Harry Margalit is Associate Professor in Architecture at the University of New South Wales. He has a professional degree in architecture, and a PhD from the Power Institute of Fine Arts at The University of Sydney. Following on from his PhD topic, he has published extensively on Australian Modernist architecture and colonial modernism. This in turn has informed a range of recent publications on design theory, energy policy and urban development. He also has extensive industry experience, and continues to design and build.

Creativity is the socially validated application of imagination. To be creative is not only to imagine, describe or fabricate something new or unprecedented. Creativity also implies that a social good attaches to the new thing, so that its qualities are recognised in relation to their uniqueness, as well as their utility, insight, aesthetic value etc. Thus to be creative is to show an imaginative capacity that is socially admired or respected.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Creativity sits atop mastery of a field or part of a field of endeavour. Architecture is pre-disposed towards creativity because it involves the comprehensive imagining of something not yet existing. This does not guarantee creativity, because imagining can be done by invoking existing (mundane) classes of buildings, which are then adapted to circumstance. Basic imaginative manipulation does not carry the social admiration that attaches to good buildings—those that do not resemble existing classes, yet demonstrate mastery of architectural conventions.

What role does creativity play in design? Design is imagining, manipulating and refining an object before it exists. Creativity in design is the capacity to undertake this in an uncommonly abstract fashion, such that the object’s many relations to convention and social utility are particularly well-refined. Part of this refinement is the transcending of commonplace classes of object or aesthetics.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? There needs to be demonstrated mastery of the field (or parts of the field) so that the transcendence of the commonplace can be recognised. There needs to be a quantum of intelligence evident in the relationship set up between the product and its social utility. There needs to be an ordering of the social requirements of the product that demonstrates a keen grasp of the demands of these requirements.

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Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how?

Harry Margalit

The highest form of critique is grounded in an appreciation of the field of design, its socially constructed criteria, and its relations to its fabricators and users.

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Creativity is continually assessed through review or critique. The highest form of critique is grounded in an appreciation of the field of design, its socially constructed criteria, and its relations to its fabricators and users. Creativity is a relational quality that is it is not assessed on innovation or fabrication alone, but rather on the basis of a particular ‘fit’ proposed between the existing and something yet to exist.

Alex Milton Heriot-Watt university

What is ‘creativity’?

Alex Milton is Director of Research and Postgraduate Studies and Reader in Design at the School of Textiles and Design, Heriot-Watt University. Formerly Head of Design and Applied Arts at Edinburgh College of Art, he has taught at the University of Dundee, Edinburgh Napier University and Central Saint Martins, and is an external examiner at several UK universities. As a designer, researcher, educator and writer, he aims to create new methods and formats to encourage meaningful consumer and audience participation in the production, consumption and interpretation of design, enabling the creation of inclusive designs for people, with people. Alex has created installations for The Scottish Show at MUDAC, Lausanne, Switzerland, curated an exhibition for Scotland’s Housing Expo, and designed an innovative rotationally moulded seating range for Outgang. He has contributed to a number of books and publications, and Laurence King will publish ‘Product Design’, co-authored with Paul Rodgers, in 2011.

Creativity in design starts with concepts and questions, challenging established design precepts and socio-cultural, ethical and technical assumptions to ensure that we do not merely play a role in shaping objects, materials and spaces for today’s customers, but begin to define the very nature of what society may need, want and desire in the future.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? A genuinely creative design culture is one engaged in ongoing debate on all aspects of design, a culture that thrives on appropriate and new ideas, new ways of doing things and new areas of exploration. Creative designers should experiment and take risks in order to carve new aesthetic paths and make technical innovations within, and beyond, their design discipline.

What role does creativity play in design? Creativity in design is the application of process, skills, material understanding and the development of ideas through making. Creativity enables designers to develop a personal vocabulary for creative development and presentation founded on critical appraisal and research. It enables them to develop their entrepreneurial, interpersonal and professional skills to position themselves successfully within the creative industries.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? If they have questioned and challenged prevailing paradigms, and applied their previous learning to unfamiliar situations, to successfully create appropriate concepts, artefacts and solutions. Creativity needs to be questioning, speculative and reflective.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? At Edinburgh College of Art we developed a clear pedagogical strategy for developing, facilitating and assessing creativity. We identified that a design student’s creative journey is characterised by sequential, experiential and iterative learning. Art and Design education in Scotland largely follows

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Alex Milton

Despite the quality and originality of the artefact or output being the ultimate goal, it is critical that assessment criteria are aligned to, but separate from, the artefact itself.

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a constructivist model subscribing to the view that knowledge and understanding are not acquired passively but in an active manner through personal experience and experiential activities. We believe that learning is based on an exploration of a particular line of enquiry and active engagement with ideas. For the majority of their studies, the design students will not encounter prescriptive assessment where the absolute answers are known in advance of setting the assessed task. Assessment needs to be rigorous and robust and depends upon significant involvement of whole programme teams to ensure objectivity, accuracy, consistency and fairness to the students concerned. The approach to assessment therefore needs to be fully aligned and supportive of this particular pedagogical approach. Despite the quality and originality of the artefact or output being the ultimate goal, it is critical that assessment criteria are aligned to, but separate from, the artefact itself. Only by achieving this will students be encouraged to ‘take risks’, be innovative and feel supported to be truly creative without the risk of punitive failure during their essential formative years.

Andrea Mina rmit university

What is ‘creativity’?

Andrea has over eighteen years teaching experience in the field of design conducted through the design studio. His design teaching is researchled and is located broadly within the framework of design enquiry through making. He has examined Bachelor of Architecture students at RMIT, Melbourne University and Deakin University and has been external moderator of the Bachelor of Arts (Interior Design) program at the University of South Australia and at Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore. He was a member of a team of four chief investigators awarded an ARC Discovery grant in 2005 entitled Spatial Knowledge and the Built Environment: The Design Implications of Making, Processing and Digitally Prototyping Architectural Models.

Creativity is the ability to consciously make or bring something new into being through the re-organisation of the existing, guided by a richness of imagination and original ideas. One needs to acknowledge different levels and scales of creativity, which range from the myriad acts of making— which constitute and define the everyday acts of living—to the creative acts that are made through higher orders of intent, intellectual engagement and richness of thought. In the context of this enquiry, we need to lay aside the original act of creation (whatever that may be), whilst being mindful that all energy— mass being a manifestation of energy—can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed from one state to another. Thus, creative acts of design amount to the re-ordering of that which already exists into new processes, products and forms that have value in the context of the societies within which they are located.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? In interior design, creativity presents itself through the production of designs that offer new or different ways of accommodating life, or apprehending and experiencing the world.

What role does creativity play in design? If one accepts that design is not limited to problem solving, then creativity in design is essential in order to perpetuate the development of cultures and civilisations by negating the status quo, without which we would inevitably descend into stagnation and collapse.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? Whilst all actions, or the products of actions, are essentially creative in that they bring into being something that did not exist before, in this context it requires original thinking and assemblage of ideas or new and meaningful ways of doing or making.

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Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how?

Andrea Mina

Assessment is predicated on the quality of thinking, the richness of ideas, the development of original responses to the thesis propositions and how these are incorporated into the designs.

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The assessment of creative works is necessary if one is seeking original thought, new ways of doing things, or new uses of material—rather than simply responding to the pragmatic requirements of a brief or providing the lowest common denominator response. In the first semester of the fourth and final year of the Bachelor of Design (Interior Design) program at RMIT University, students are required to research a self-nominated area of interest through design. At the conclusion of the semester they are required to produce a thesis document accounting for their research together with a thesis proposition, which in the second semester is manifest through a designed project. Assessment is predicated on the quality of thinking, the richness of ideas, the development of original responses to the thesis propositions and how these are incorporated into the designs.

Greg Missingham the university of melbourne

What is ‘creativity’? A proposition is creative if: Primarily teaching architectural design and design approaches and methods, and supervising RHDs, Greg Missingham is particularly interested in design teaching as a research vehicle. His other main research interest is the public realms of major institutional buildings (as in the Justice sector). Formally, Greg is Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning) of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at The University of Melbourne. Greg has taught at four schools of architecture in the state of Victoria and at Southeastern University, Nanjing. He has lectured elsewhere in Australia, China and Indonesia and published in Australasia, China, Europe, Japan and the US. In practice, Greg has produced housing, residential aged care complexes, school and TAFE buildings and increasingly concentrated on pre-design (strategic resource plans, feasibility studies, functional briefs) for government, Victoria Police and TAFEs. He is currently working on a book on heuristic approaches to the design of contemporary Chinese gardens.

♦♦ it is relatively novel for its domain (‘I don’t think I’ve seen this before’); ♦♦ it adds value to the total information content of the domain, it enriches or enlarges it (‘this adds to what we used to think’); and, ♦♦ it, whether abstract, relational, or embodied in discursive, material or behavioural form, is suggestively fecund or provocative for others to build with and on (‘I can see what this might lead to’). Novelty is not enough on its own (though relative novelty seems always to be required). Creativity also necessitates surprise or unexpectedness— according to Lehrer (2009), encountering the unexpected is the quintessential step from which our brains learn. Indeed, creative propositions are those that do all three and, sometimes, result in paradigm shifts of thinking and production in the domain. That is, creativity is the capacity to produce outcomes that are socio-culturally recognised as having these qualities, doing these things. Further, creativity as a capacity is not a state—it is misleading to say that matters, people or propositions are creative or not creative. Creativity varies in degrees. The outcomes of work, the proposition(s) that informed that work, and the individual or group that produced the work, may be said to be creative.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Creativity is found in all aspects of the work of the intellectual domains of architecture and design; the discipline and the profession and their products. But, it is primarily and most readily acknowledged with design outcomes—buildings, urban areas, landscapes and other artefacts. It may be recognised in their forms, their materials and construction, and/or in the ideas, the thinking and working processes of their designers. Sometimes, though less frequently, creativity is acknowledged in supporting texts of two kinds: de facto manifestoes by lauded designers

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How do we recognise creativity? Through noting the presence of that triumvirate of qualities: relative novelty, domain enrichment and suggestiveness that is further productive for others.

and more or less theoretical-historical works by others. The designers themselves are much more likely to be labelled creative than are those others—implying that usage of the term creativity requires produced, artefactual outcomes as a kind of base condition. However, in all cases, we recognise creativity, sometimes having looked for it. It does not ‘present’ itself. How do we recognise creativity? Through noting the presence of that triumvirate of qualities: relative novelty, domain enrichment and suggestiveness that is further productive for others.

What role does creativity play in design? I think that designing is inherently propositional, that designers offer proposals for new futures and that only very rarely do they ‘solve’ problems (even if we sometimes still speak of ‘creative solutions’). Those futures would be new because they would differ from the futures that could otherwise be extrapolated from the status quo. The futures would result from continuing negotiations during designing between the present conditions selectively attended to, notions of futures desired and proposals being articulated. ‘Designers are driven not by their knowledge but by their curiosity’ (Steenbergen & Roh 2003: 16). Curiosity is inherently engaged with the novel and, once discovered or produced, the novel adds to a culture’s sum total of information. The curiosity of other designers drives further designing from that basis. Creativity is manifest in designers’ choice of what to address in a commissioned situation, what to pay attention to, what to be curious about in a task, circumstance, possible outcome or context, what material and thinking tools to bring to bear on the task as they negotiate and define it with others, at what scale, degree of detail and depth to make a proposal, and in making cases for their proposals.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? This is covered in my answer to the first question and, if the question may be glossed as ‘how do we recognise creativity in the actions of others?’, then I address it in the next answer.

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Greg Missingham

Now, a caveat: novelty requires a minimum of unexpectedness but there is a fuzzy upper limit to comprehensible unexpectedness.

However, at the risk of logical circularity, recognising creativity requires first that we be intrigued; that a proposition, action or product holds our interest long enough for its creativity to be appreciated. Why are we intrigued? Perhaps because of that very creativity, and/or because of the proposition’s, action’s or product’s framing of its presentation, promotion or publicity. Or, because attention is drawn to its novelty, new information content or suggestiveness by its author(s) or others. And, the others with which we are most familiar are design students: we have all seen the fashions in formal propositions that sweep across design studios and wondered where they came from. Now, a caveat: novelty requires a minimum of unexpectedness but there is a fuzzy upper limit to comprehensible unexpectedness. And, within that range, what intrigues will be subject to vagaries of socio-cultural fashion, acceptability, taste cultures, attentiveness, education and other, often unconscious, negotiated determinants of that fuzzy boundary.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Whether a proposition is relatively novel (or surprising or unexpected) can be assessed by knowledgeable/experienced assessors aided and abetted by databases of some sort. Usually, however, such databases are inexplicit and opaque because they are distributed across and within the minds of those assessors. Plus, there is an inherent logical problem, and I am mindful of 18th century Englishmen’s problems with black swans (e.g. Taleb 2008): to demonstrate relative unexpectedness is to demonstrate a negative (‘we have not met this before’). Useful questions can be asked to help us decide whether a proposition demonstrates enrichment of the information stock of the domain: ♦♦ are more issues covered? ♦♦ are more aspects of any one issue covered? ♦♦ is the proposition deeper than relatively similar ones? ♦♦ does it have cross-disciplinary implications? These lend themselves to criterion-based assessment and the use of rubrics.

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Greg Missingham

Often assessors recognise oppor-tunities that are not explicit in work. Then the assessment issue is whether the student was aware of them.

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Whether a proposition is fecund for many others inherently seems to require retrospective assessment over time—entailing searches for ramifications, consequences and/or subsequent emulations. But, in design studio assessments, we can examine a proposition for whether principles are enunciated, multiplying pathways outlined or generative systems made clear that others could take up (thus exposing the design proposition’s ‘implicate fecundity’). Again, experienced assessors ought to be able to do this and rubrics could help. Often assessors recognise opportunities that are not explicit in work. Then the assessment issue is whether the student was aware of them.

Clare Newton the university of melbourne

What is ‘creativity’? As a cliché, creativity is: Clare Newton is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne and President of the Associate of Architecture Schools of Australasia. An expert in multimedia development for education, she is currently conducting research into the design of educational buildings.

♦♦ secret design business; ♦♦ God’s work of making something from nothing; ♦♦ a mysterious and painful act normally undertaken by artists; ♦♦ an elite endeavour not easily understood by a layperson. ♦♦ I find the following explanations more useful: ♦♦ problem solving, particularly ‘wicked’ problem solving where the design process helps to define the problem; ♦♦ problem solving using strategies such as metaphors and the borrowing from other disciplines; ♦♦ collaboration, particularly with people outside the discipline; ♦♦ interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary thinking; ♦♦ lateral or divergent thinking focused on the issues rather than reaching one outcome through convergent thinking; ♦♦ critiquing and testing of many possible solutions hopefully leading to…; ♦♦ …a ‘Eureka’ moment arising after intense immersion and reflection around a problem.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? At its worst, creativity for students: ♦♦ is a unique solution which will come to them if they wait long enough; ♦♦ is an argument for a design which ‘feels right’ but is difficult to justify on other grounds;

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♦♦ is something others are more gifted in; Currently, the only way I would use the term ‘creativity’ in a studio would be if it were at the heart of the studio to give students a chance to unpack and demystify what has become a tarnished term.

♦♦ is heroic. More positively, in our discipline creativity presents as: ♦♦ new knowledge about an old problem; ♦♦ a new problem which enables new thinking; ♦♦ new thinking enabled by new technologies; ♦♦ a design which delights or satisfies a client or community in unexpected ways; ♦♦ the oxymoron of ‘creative imitation’ where an architect or student takes from others and ‘layers up’ or reduces what has been ‘stolen’ or imitated to make their own; ♦♦ a design at the forefront of its time which becomes the basis of inspiration to others; ♦♦ flexible thinking and fluid intelligence; ♦♦ conceptual blending and hybrid thinking; ♦♦ new and unexpected associations and combinations into design applications.

What role does creativity play in design? Avoiding the ‘C’-word: While I have not consciously avoided the word ‘creativity’ in my design studios and associated assessment rubrics, I realise it is a term that I have not been interested in using. I find the term unhelpful in describing what it is that we as an architecture profession try to achieve. Indeed, I find the term inhibiting because it has come to be associated with the range of clichés listed against the first question. For me, the term has become too closely associated with the idea of individual inspiration in the style of Howard Roark or of an artist struggling for inspiration in his (usually ‘his’) garret at the margins of society. Currently, the only way I would use the term ‘creativity’ in a studio would be if it were at the heart of the studio to give students a chance to unpack and demystify what has become a tarnished term.

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Clare Newton

To assess creativity, it is useful to assess the underpinning qualities of understanding, applying, evaluating and analysing.

I find the term ‘innovation’ more useful. Innovation suggests the effective application of new ideas. The idea of innovation takes the pressure off students and architects to be creative in the sense of having new ideas and translates their effort and focus onto the application of ideas which are already out in the ether.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative innovative? A simple solution which concurrently resolves complex problems: ♦♦ decisions based on deep knowledge of life as well as the built environment disciplines, and careful exploration and interpretation of the design problems; ♦♦ architectural ideas which translate into built form; ♦♦ apparently serendipitous outcomes; ♦♦ empathy; ♦♦ a willingness to work with uncertainty and a willingness to postpone decisions.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? The levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) are a useful starting point. It is interesting that the upper two levels were swapped from the original taxonomy to the new, placing ‘creating’ at the top above ‘evaluating’. Bloom’s taxonomy can be easily dismissed as too simplistic—a tool more suitable for K-12, but it gives a useful building block approach underpinning creativity. To assess creativity, it is useful to assess the underpinning qualities of understanding, applying, evaluating and analysing. It is useful to assess the justification; that is, the thinking behind the solution, rather than simply the solution.

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Margaret Portillo University of florida

What is ‘creativity’?

Margaret Portillois is Professor and Chair of the Department of Interior Design in the College of Design, Construction and Planning at the University of Florida. Portillo serves as Editorin-Chief for the Journal of Interior Design, a scholarly, refereed academic journal dedicated to issues relating to the design of the interior environment. Previous contributions to the Journal included service as Chair of Publications Board and Guest Editor for a special issue on narrative inquiry. Portillo has also been Chair of the Research Council for the Foundation for Interior Design Education and Research and was appointed to the Standards committee of the Council for Interior Design Accreditation. Recent books include Design Thinking for Interiors: Inquiry + Experience + Impact (Protillo, in press) and Color Planning for Interiors: An Integrative Approach to Color ([Portillo 2009). These books offer original conceptual frameworks, applied research and narratives of memorable design experiences. Work on creativity in the workplace and education has appeared in academic journals and edited books including in

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A creative person should be able to produce something original and valuable whether that takes the form of an idea, product or process. Yet creativity extends beyond the individual. While encompassing divergent thinking, creativity is more than the fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration of ideas. Certainly, divergent thinking and the greater capacity to create varies from individual to individual but, more importantly, creativity can be cultivated across the lifespan. A multi-faceted and complex construct with varied interpretations, creativity at a fundamental level can be understood in terms of novelty and appropriateness. Novelty recognises originality. Appropriateness speaks to value, fit and suitability. Creativity and its attendant dimensions may be most fully expressed contextually. For example, creativity resides within individuals, groups and society. It is expressed as a mindset for living as well as in special talents. Innovation crosses and unites disciplines, yet in many ways is domainspecific. Relating to time and place, historical and social factors influence creativity and, to a certain extent, so too does the physical environment. Traditionally research psychologists defined creativity in terms of person, process, product and press. More recently to emphasise the acceptance of innovative ideas or products, several scholars have made the case for adding persuasion to the 4Ps, acknowledging that innovation does not exist within a vacuum. The challenge of a universal definition remains. Yet, exciting scholarship is increasing discipline specific knowledge in many parts of the globe. Important to individual development, indispensable to progress, creativity is essential to the world in which we live.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Creativity presents itself again and again in interior design. Practitioners need to innovate when addressing form and functionality as well as encouraging empathy and civility in the work they design for individuals and groups. Embedded in the very process of interior design practice, creativity surfaces in ideas, hand and digital drawings and models, detail development and in client presentations (or persuasion) featuring interior design projects ranging from international airports to neonatal intensive care units.

The State of the Interior Design Profession (Portillo 2010) and The Blackwell Handbook of Interior Design (Portillo, in press). Portillo’s psychologicallybased research on creativity in design and allied disciplines has been disseminated in academic journal articles, chapters, award-winning presentations and industry publications worldwide.

Creativity also manifests itself in interior design research. Scholars, for example, examine creative personality traits and characteristics or study creativity in the design process. They also systematically evaluate interiors or explore the many meanings these spaces hold for individuals. Conducting a content analysis of design periodicals, Elaine Pedersen and Kathryn Burton (2009) examined published research on design creativity. The literature they reviewed appeared quite varied; however, ideation and novelty surfaced as two attribute clusters bridging many studies. The authors also expressed concern that an overall failure to pose explicit definitions of creativity in many design focused studies would impede the building of a domain-specific knowledge, echoing a widely voiced concern of scholars across fields. Yet important strides are being made by pioneering design scholars, educators and practitioners who expand the boundaries of interior design and thus are able to shift and advance the development of the discipline.

What role does creativity play in design? Creativity enables the body of knowledge to enlarge, become deeper and interconnected. The opportunity to create in a meaningful way draws many to design disciplines and sustains practitioners over time. Design disciplines recognise the ability to create as a core disciplinary competency. For example, the Council for Interior Design Accreditation (2010: 13), whose mission it is to ensure quality interior design education across North America, states in their professional standards: [e]ntry-level interior designers need to apply all aspects of the design process to creative problem solving. Design process enables designers to identify and explore complex problems and generate creative solutions that support human behavior within the interior environment. In allied design fields, students develop their creativity to a certain extent in design programs and continue to cultivate these abilities and skills in practice. Both focused adaptations and far-reaching breakthroughs play a role in design disciplines where novel and appropriate solutions to real world problems are sought. Presently, I see creativity less about the signature designer and more about systems of designers, teams and engaged clients and stakeholders working in close collaboration in physical and virtual settings. For the individual, trajectories of creative thought and productivity can grow and mature (Carmel-Gilfilen & Portillo 2010). As beginning designers, thinking changes from a dualistic

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What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative may reflect current disciplinary expectations rather than objective absolutes.

perspective to become increasingly rich and multilayered—so too does their capacity for creative thought. Beginning designers, for instance, often view design criteria as constraining, whereas more advanced design thinkers see criteria as framing innovation; that is, with experience, design constraints are increasingly reframed as springboards for innovation.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? This question can only be answered contextually. Firstly, and somewhat easily determined, is whether the action or products are original and unique. Secondly, and more difficult to ascertain, is the appropriateness of the actions or products. Experts within a discipline usually appear best able to gauge the value of a solution. At times what makes someone or something seem innovative may be more relational than absolute. In interior design, clients select the design option based on their needs. This decision entails many considerations, sometimes emphasising creativity, sometimes not. When evaluating a competition, judges evaluate the entries in a pool, based in part on the creative interpretation of the competition criteria. Other juries with similar calibre, but different composition of judges, may or may not arrive at the same conclusion. Creativity depends in large part on informed interpretation. What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative may reflect current disciplinary expectations rather than objective absolutes. Over time the human dimension in the interior environment is felt more acutely and only with the passage of time can the space be truly judged. Contemporary interior design work deemed creative today may be judged differently in the future, either retaining its currency, increasing in value or fading away.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? The answer is: yes and no. Scholars often acknowledge the difficulty of tapping into the act of creation; no matter the methodological sophistication, creativity at a certain level is inherently mysterious. Resulting literature typically underemphasises aspects of creativity that are more challenging to quantify. At the same time, we know certain dimensions of this construct can be measured. Post-positivistic quantitative methods offer well-defined metrics, answering questions of what and how much. Qualitative methods allow for a constructivist understanding of creativity, advancing questions of why and how. A mixed methods approach lends itself to holistic assessment, weaving patterns quantitatively and qualitatively. My own research experience, and that of

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Margaret Portillo

Narrative inquiry also offers an interesting avenue to study design thinking and creativity (Danko, Meneely & Portillo 2006; Portillo 2000).

my graduate students, typically employs mixed methods. For example, one study explored implicit theories of creativity by constructing profiles of innovative practitioners in interior design, architecture, landscape architecture and engineering using the Gough Adjective Checklist and open-ended survey questions sent to a large sample of educators from each discipline (Portillo 2002). Other work on creative traits of beginning design students employed Davis’ How Do You Think instrument (Portillo & Dohr 1989), as well as the Hermann Brain Dominance Indicator (Meneely & Portillo 2005). Another study using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator discovered that noted designers display normally distributed traits such as extraversion and introversion, but appeared significantly more intuitive or future oriented than the general population of adults (Portillo & Dohr 1994). Narrative inquiry also offers an interesting avenue to study design thinking and creativity (Danko, Meneely & Portillo 2006; Portillo 2000). To explore the notion of a mature creativeness, a narrative methodology focused on the professional relationship between a design firm and a client developing over many years (Portillo & Dohr 2000). Another study used mixed methods including narrative inquiry. This research focused on the workplace and used KEYS: Assessing the Climate for Creativity to assess supports and barriers to workplace creativity, a measure of job satisfaction, as well as employee interviews and site observations (Miller 2005). Complimenting the quantitative data gathered, a narrative presented a true account of how the employees under study approached a major prospective client presentation through intensive brainstorming and preparation that transformed the workplace physically. This narrative captured a memorable instance of fun in the workplace and reinforced quantitative findings showing organisational support for creativity as well as high job satisfaction. Other research focused on a salient creative product in interior design: digital portfolio. One study delved into practitioner views on creativity in portfolios developed for employment searches (Levin 2007). A related study on portfolio assessment compared perceptions of designers based in Thailand and the United States (Kobnithikulwong 2010). Both groups of senior-level practitioners saw creativity in the portfolios as relating to novelty, appropriateness, aesthetics and technical skills. Interestingly, the designers in both cultures agreed on the most and least creative portfolios. Cross-cultural studies most often examine creativity in education or the workplace (Simonton 2006). Continued scholarship will be necessary to carefully consider

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Margaret Portillo

The exploration of creativity globally holds much pro-mise as interior design increases its international recognition as a discipline.

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underlying assumptions and possible cultural bias in prevailing Western theories and research. The exploration of creativity globally holds much promise as interior design increases its international recognition as a discipline. Assessment of this construct is not for the faint-hearted but is critical to advance a domain-specific understanding of creativity.

Anthony Radford the university of adelaide

What is ‘creativity’?

Antony (Tony) Radford is Professor of Architecture in The University of Adelaide School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design. An architect and planner, he is author and coauthor of books on sustainable architecture, computer-aided design, optimisation and design theory. He teaches in architecture, urban design and digital design programs.

Creativity relates to creation, to making some ‘thing’ or idea or action. It is evident in four ways: in the creative product, the creative process, the creative person and the creative situation (Briskman 1981; Brown 1989). The creative person in a creative situation follows a creative process to produce creative products (ideas, insights, designs, art etc.). The key is the outcome; people, processes and situations are only deemed to be creative if the products are deemed to be creative. Definitions of a creative product typically link novelty with value, both being necessary to some degree. Judgements of both novelty and value are subject to time, cultural and personal variation—therefore judgements of creativity are never absolute.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? I currently teach in three areas: architecture, urban design and digital design. Creativity presents itself similarly in all three areas as a combination of novelty and value; it is not a discipline-specific phenomenon.

What role does creativity play in design? Creativity is a part of all design activity; though this relates to my view of creativity as being common in a scale from low to high degrees, rather than as being either present or absent. I view creativity in design in relation to my own way of framing design, which links concepts of patterns, rules, contingency and a search for responsive cohesion (Fox 2007) within a reflective practice. The re-use of a well-known pattern is unlikely to be regarded as highly creative. Similarly, following established rules is not a route to high creativity. But taking a pattern from one field and applying it in another field is a much-followed strategy to promote creativity.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? This returns to the question of what is creativity. Actions or products are not creative without the combination of novelty and value, but as noted above both novelty and value are slippery concepts. An action or product

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that is seen as highly novel but of limited apparent value may be regarded as creative, but it must be considered to have at least some potential value.

Anthony Radford

Creativity can be assessed through the two required characteristics of the product or action: novelty and value.

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Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Creativity can be assessed through the two required characteristics of the product or action: novelty and value. For judgement of what is ‘novel’ one needs knowledge of the discipline and what has gone before. For judgement of what is ‘of value’, I use the triple ‘place, people, stuff ’ as a checklist, so the creative product responds innovatively to its physical and environmental contexts (including the global environmental context), its people (social, cultural and narrow functional) contexts, and the technological and material contexts of its own fabrication. The way this plays out does vary with the field, so that the judgement of what is of value in architecture, urban design and digital design will differ. For example, the rapid change and short life of designed products that is common and acceptable in digital environments is inappropriate in architecture and urban design. The creativity of a process, person or situation cannot be assessed without reference to products, but there is a surrogate in the assessment of characteristics of people and processes that are known to be associated with creativity. These include risk-taking, exploration of possibilities and going outside norms (‘lateral thinking’) in both process and product.

Susan Savage queensland university of technology

What is ‘creativity’?

Professor Susan Savage is an architect and Chairperson for the Board of Architects of Queensland. She is currently ALTC Discipline Scholar for Architecture and Assistant Dean, Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering at the Queensland University of Technology, where she has taught and led course and teaching development in architecture for an extended period. In 2000, Sue became the first Queensland University of Technology academic and first architecture academic in the nation to win an Australian Award for University Teaching. Her research interests centre on the culture of the architecture profession and on higher education (most particularly on the development of disciplinespecific professional knowledge). Sue recently completed an ALTC funded research project entitled Professional Education in Built Environment and Design, which focuses on the transition of graduates from university to professional life and the ways in which both the academy and practice characterise and support this experience.

Creativity is the result of interaction/s of various parts of the brain; these interactions generate productive types of thinking. Neuroscientists are unsure as to which parts of the brain are involved and, in the same way that they are unsure about the causes of intelligence quotient, they are unable to conclude on a genetic prototyping for creativity. Creativity appears to involve the breaking of established links between whichever parts of the brain are involved, re-establishing them in a different order and choosing an expression of the revised order that is valued. Creativity requires imagination, purposefulness, originality-seeking—in that it is directed at a particular problem—and value-judgement.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? In architectural problem-solving, creativity is inevitably both reductive and original. The architect chooses as many pieces of information deemed relevant to the problem at hand that can be rationally processed. He/she then prioritises and selects amongst them, and reconfigures and recodes them to produce one solution; that is, a particular design for a building/ space in a particular place at a particular time for a particular client or group of stakeholders. The merit of the solution will depend on the architect’s ability at each phase of the process where choices are made, in a reductive act, towards a single solution. Producing a range of possibilities to choose from will depend on the designer’s experience and repertoire of precedents and cases. Their prioritisation and choice-making will form (based on heuristic thinking) around their knowledge of what might work best in the range of circumstances surrounding the problem, and according to the value they attribute to the problem and its possible solutions. Creative architectural thinking involves attending to the ‘stuff ’ of the problem at hand.

What role does creativity play in design? Creativity, as a way of characterising thinking, is important in designing when it allows the designer to handle (critically) a wide range of variables (some of which shift during the process of designing); to order, reorder

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We do not know the cause of creativity. We do not know what ‘makes’ a person creative.

and prioritise these variables according to an appropriately-conceived and value-laden schema and to finally produce an artefact. Creativity, that is a type brain activity, is important; as architectural designing is essentially about imagining a wide range of possibilities, mucking around with these possibilities by decoding and recoding them, reconfiguring the parts in a way which aligns to the problem at hand, and then producing something of value. Design thinking is a form of creative thinking according to the definitions given by neuroscientists about how the brain works during moments of creativity.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? We do not know the cause of creativity. We do not know what ‘makes’ a person creative. Products of actions are not creative given that creativity is a particular, if somewhat under-known, brain process. Products of a person’s actions are artefacts (be they thoughts explained or physical objects). These artefacts can be described in terms of their purpose, shape, fit, usefulness, value, aesthetic quality, place, time and so on. They may even be judged by these terms. A person may have invoked creativity (that is the particular brain activity which is poorly understood by neuroscience) to produce the artefact, but then again they may not have done so—and from the outside we will never know. The products of a person’s actions just ‘are’. The merit of these products is measurable, and contestable, according to the values placed by the audience (be that critic, client, historian or designer) on aspects of the problem and the solution. Although products can never be creative in themselves, it is probably possible to arrange conditions under which creativity can be nourished and flourish and where, as a result, the products of creative thinking may be more closely aligned with what is valued for the problem at hand. In environments where ‘having a go’ is valued and where expression of alternatives is encouraged, individuals are more likely to allow themselves to deconstruct and reconstruct their thinking in productive ways. In environments where the value of solutions is discussed, critiqued and understood, creative thinking may be focused more effectively on the problem at hand. These kinds of environments, according to neuroscientists, encourage brain plasticity and allow for the kinds of brain interactions which underpin creativity. Places where disbelief can be suspended, and where the results of such suspense are debated, are

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conducive to the exploration of alternatives. ‘What if ’ scenarios are likely to prosper in such environments.

Susan Savage

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative may reflect current disciplinary expectations rather than objective absolutes.

Value-formation is critical to developing the capacity for creative thinking. Inevitably, in the reductive design process that characterises what architects do, there must be good foundations for choice-making. This is not a simple case of moral ethics (a ‘do no harm’ approach), but rather a longer-term project of understanding the context for decision-making, respecting this context and adding something worthwhile to it.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? The products of creative thinking can be assessed. Indeed this is all that can be assessed since even neuroscientists struggle to identify, let alone assess, creativity itself. Our attempts, therefore, to assess creativity (the process) as educators would be amateur at best, dangerous at worst (descending as they would most likely do to the depths of pop-psychology), and fundamentally biased—we do not assess other parts of students’ brainworkings; why would we assess this one? We would, therefore, need to restrict ourselves to assess the artefacts that students produce. We might organise the conditions for that production so that creativity can flourish, however, given that we do not (or should not) assess the student’s persona, we should not assess the ill-defined nature of a student’s creativity—we simply do not know what it is. Creativity appears to align with design thinking. In providing opportunities for design thinking and its assessment, the educators role is manifold—we should talk about this way of thinking; we should allow for students to practice its constituent parts in a problem-directed way; we should keep abreast of developments in the neuroscience of creativity and experiment with these developments; we should provide a safe and fearless environment for thought experiments; and, we should reward elements of student output that demonstrate a willingness to both represent the imagining of wide-ranging alternatives and provide reasoned, value-laden choice amongst them. We should help students to begin to build a repertoire of cases, knowledge and precedents that can be scrambled, reconfigured and judged amongst. And, as our students struggle to reorder the code of our discipline, we should take great care to assess only their work.

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Christoph Schnoor unitect institute of technology

What is ‘creativity’?

Christoph Schnoor is a Senior Lecturer at Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand. He studied architecture in Berlin, Germany, and in Aarhus, Denmark. He completed his Dr Ing studies on Le Corbusier’s earliest treatise on urban design, La Construction des villes, at the Technische Universität Berlin in 2002. In 2003–04 he was the recipient of a scholarship by the Gerda-Henkel-Foundation, Dusseldorf, which allowed him to establish a full commented edition of La Construction des villes that was published in 2008. Christoph has lectured at Unitec since 2004, teaching history and theory of architecture as well as design studio. In 2007–08 he was the studio co-ordinator for fifth year Bachelor of Architecture, in 2008–09 he was the Programme Director for the Master of Architecture (Professional), and in 2009–10 he was a Guest Professor at Wismar University of Technology, Business and Design in Wismar, Germany. He has published on Le Corbusier, the history and theory of modern architecture, and colonial architecture in the Pacific region.

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Creativity is the ability to create something new, out of the pool of existing, or rather, available things, in a given situation and from the author’s reservoir of present, applied or transformed knowledge. An important aspect here is the question of originality or reproduction, i.e. copying. German literature has had a big case recently with an18year old author becoming famous nationwide with a novel, which turned out to be more or less directly copied from other works, amongst these, a rather unknown novel by a Berlin blogger. So the debate raged and critics discussed whether and, if so, to what degree and under what circumstances the author was allowed to copy. Almost everyone involved in this debate agreed that artists at most times use material from sources that are not their own. So the question might be; how can we be creative when, as it becomes apparent, all the material is already there and there is hardly anything new to invent? It seems that creativity lies in the art of combination and in an art of arriving at a new synthesis of elements.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? In architecture, creativity presents itself in various ways—in written, drawn, and modelled samples. Through these different media, the advancement of how architecture can be understood is shown. Interestingly enough, there are clear cultural differences discernible between the two architectural design cultures that I am familiar with (New Zealand and Germany): the difference is the value placed upon the ‘creative’, the design part of an architectural scheme. It seems that in German schools, as much as one looks for innovative solutions, these innovations are required to take place in a very tightly framed ‘space’ of thought (e.g. a new detail for a façade system can be the innovation in a design project). On the other hand, it seems that in New Zealand schools, creativity is normally sought in formal inventions; overall formal suggestions rather than formal-technical solutions.

There is another interesting dichotomy to be observed: some schools of thought follow the notion that originality and creativity need to come from within.

There is another interesting dichotomy to be observed: some schools of thought follow the notion that originality and creativity need to come from within. These, like the early Bauhaus school, would try to ‘unlearn’ habits that were supposedly covering up the original and creative nature of the students. These schools believe that students should not start with reproducing but with producing designs from their ‘inner pool of knowledge’ and creatively applying this to given tasks. Other schools of thought tend to believe that, since there is no such thing as completely original thinking, it is all about learning ‘from the outside’, from precedents of thought and form, and that creativity lies in the intelligent variation of the appropriated material.

What role does creativity play in design? Creativity, of course, is the crucial element without which design cannot exist. Having said that: if ‘creativity’ becomes an excuse for thoughtless form-making, it loses its raison d’être. I understand design as a constant exchange between rational and irrational elements of thinking, as an interaction of play and logic. Playfulness is crucial since it allows new and unseen solutions to emerge, but logic is just as crucial since it provides the framework of decision-making and the background for testing the newly found solutions. Therefore, the creative acts in designing are only one of several parts of ‘design’ as a whole. The ability to order, to make (subconscious and conscious) choices out of the vast range of possibilities, to discern between the unimportant and the important—although seemingly not elementary to creativity— reveals the great creative minds since they will be able to make just the right decisions. And what are they? Design is, partly, about establishing a framework in which decisions can be made. In order to know what one does while designing, one needs to know whether the infinitely many solutions that come to mind are relevant, and how they can be applied to the framework one has established for oneself.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? If actions or products make us see things in a new light; if they combine things we know to achieve something unexpected; surprise us with new ways of seeing well-known things; put a new spin on things: then these actions or products are regarded as creative. As an example, we could take

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Christoph Schnoor

...creativity is always to be measured within a particular cultural context and it has become obvious to me that this, to a high degree, often (unconsciously) determines the way in which creativity is assessed

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utopian paper architecture; if such a product of inventive thinking widens the debate on a topic in a particular way, it is certainly to be regarded as creative.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Combining known elements (of thought or of form) to a new product that adds to the debate; a new logical solution to a given problem that solves the questions or restrictions of the problem better than other solutions; a unity that is made of hitherto disparate elements: all these aspects would allow some measurement of creative success. But, as I have pointed out above, it also seems that creativity is always to be measured within a particular cultural context and it has become obvious to me that this, to a high degree, often (unconsciously) determines the way in which creativity is assessed.

Alex Selenitsch the university of melbourne

What is ‘creativity’? Creativity is the enemy of habit, without which it cannot exist. Both habit and creativity are necessary for survival: habit because of the need Alex Selenitsch graduated as for repeatable, reliable actions, and creativity because the context for a Bachelor of Architecture those habits can change unpredictably. If there is a mismatch between in 1969, and has worked as new context and habitual response, creativity can come into play. But not an architect in Australia and England, with long stretches as a necessarily: habitual actions can be stretched by new circumstances, and sole practitioner in Melbourne. He human tolerance of mismatched behaviours is pretty elastic. has taught architectural design, theory and history at Deakin University, RMIT University and The University of Melbourne. He was awarded a PhD in 2008 by the University of Melbourne for his dissertation (with creative work) entitled SETS, SERIES and SUITES: composing the multiple artwork. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning at The University of Melbourne, and currently teaches in Architectural Design. Alex’s creative practice ranges from literature and graphics to sculpture, furniture and architecture, with some collaborative work in furniture, artists books and theatre. He also writes essays and reviews of art, craft and design for professional and ephemeral publications. He is represented by grahame galleries + editions in Brisbane, and Place Gallery in Melbourne.

Creativity, then, has unpredictability as one of its qualities, both in timing and substance. It is a way of reconfiguring a context or situation. It can be induced by an individual’s insight, through a general failure of habitual behaviours, or through the appearance of new situations or desires.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? My disciplines stretch from literature to architecture, from language to space. Creativity is similar across these disciplines in that a new composition, idea or technique can alter the definition of the discipline, can extend its application or sphere of influence, or revitalise habitual practice. It is also similar in that it comes in different strengths, from paradigm-breaking jumps, to lattices of incremental changes, to aphasic unrelated eruptions. It is also dissimilar in that creativity is manifest in literature and architecture through different materials, taste groups and discourses. In literature, creativity inhabits a playground of speech, print, and writing, with associated discourses that include imagination and duration. In architecture, the playground is gravity, construction, manufactured materials, with associated discourses of institutions and place-making among others. Anyone without knowledge of these particular playgrounds, and perhaps their history, would find it difficult to tell where the creativity is.

What role does creativity play in design? Design is only one of the circumstances in which creativity can take place. Designers imagine, and then specify some kind of future action, often to be

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There is nothing absolute or objective about judgements of creativity: what is creative to some people may be banal or unobvious to others.

executed by someone else. A design can be initiated by a problem, which is a mismatch between habit and context, or a new reading of the context, or a new materiality, or a new system of imagining or representation. There are probably many other initiating factors. To think of a design as the completed composition or set of instructions is to miss the fact that creativity flickers through all stages of a design process and through the realisation of that design. Many people emphasise the epiphany as the creative moment, but designs can also be produced through a succession of small insights and re-contextualisations. The ‘5% inspiration/95% perspiration’ cliché refers to this, with the 5% standing for the singular epiphany—if there is one—and the 95% standing for the diffused process of bringing that epiphany into focus.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? Actions and products appear to be judged as creative through bundles of criteria, some of which are clearly understood and others that are not understood at all. Aesthetic preferences, which can be very persuasive and stubbornly held, are instances of the latter. But even instrumental factors, such as function or amenity, are subject to wide variation of prejudice and perception. Whether something is beautiful or useful is a judgement that can be brought to bear on non-creative actions or products, but noting that an action or product is creative involves the recognition of some kind of redefinition of limits, or of something new. There is nothing absolute or objective about judgements of creativity: what is creative to some people may be banal or unobvious to others. While often subject to idiosyncratic working habits, creative workers share a number of behaviours. They tend be ‘on alert’ for problems and opportunities, use some quick technique for externalising their insight or idea in 2D, 3D or 4D formats, and, if not acting as maker or producer, are often capable of producing instructions for others to follow. Pen and paper, or its ‘e-equivalents’, are always nearby.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Creativity is constantly being assessed through comparison: firstly, against the habitual response to the same situation; and, secondly, against other creative responses to the same situation.

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Alex Selenitsch

A judgement on which is the best creation emerges through a comparison of a proposition’s qualities against those in all other propositions or designs.

In the first case, the measure is instrumental, and involves this simple question: does the (new) creation work better than the old one? Using a different habitual response may not be creative in the sense of imagining something new, though it could still be creative; the found object in a composition, or the dissonant use of an existing system are two examples. Instrumental assessments of creativity can easily be done by individuals or groups, and have an aura of objectivity to them. In the second case, where the best, or rather the most favoured, creation is to be chosen, assessment can only be done through a comparison of a number of propositions or designs. More than two is essential, about ten is a good optimum. The short list in competitions is such an optimum. A judgement on which is the best creation emerges through a comparison of a proposition’s qualities against those in all other propositions or designs. Because it is a discussion, this is best done by a group of assessors. However, there is an individual’s version of this: the production of design options and the selection of the best option, but this too is best conducted through discussion. The ranking of creativity through marks, stars or elephant stamps has nothing to do with creativity. For critics, it is lazy shorthand, for educators it is a pact with (habitual) bureaucracy, for patrons and commissioners it is an opportunity to exercise power.

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Des Smith deakin university

What is ‘creativity’?

Professor Des Smith is Chair in Architecture at Deakin University. His areas of expertise cover architecture, including design in general, urban design and landscape architecture. He is a practicing architect in the states of Victoria (since 1981) and in Western Australia (since 1984) where he has worked on projects including residential, commercial and public buildings. He has also been involved in architectural projects for Aboriginal communities in Western Australia.

Creativity might be described as that intellectual and intuitive area where one senses the connections between the requirements and the possibilities of a situation. With this, one is able to embody the positive qualities of these connections within a production whereby a new clarity is given to the situations touched by these requirements. Creativity is always new in context. Particularly, purposeful creativity seems to retain a joy of the new on a rather continuing basis as long as there is some cultural receptivity on the part of the beholder. An alternate view of creativity is where we uncover or realise the retention of aspects of that whole with which we are all born, and in this view, ageing is a process of losing the naïve availability of this (always) extant wholeness. Here, creativity is that point of knowing retention coupled with activation. In the modern world (both east and west), I think it is the former description with which we tend to sense ourselves working. As a way of seeing these definitions acting in concert, Joseph Campbell would suggest that ‘the creative spirit ranges free out there in the Universe’ and we recognise, with a rather fuller consciousness, those points and places where we actively and knowingly engage this creative energy. I think it is these points and places that are the creative acts, or if you like, the actions of creativity.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Using the above definition, given the uniqueness of nearly all architectural works, creativity presents itself throughout much of the process of making buildings and places with architectural intent. Generally, however, the sense and evidence of this is present through the engagement of the lives of users with the fact of the building, as the building establishes the worthiness of occupation. For me this is a description of presence, by which I mean that the work establishes a situation where the user

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Creativity should be assessed in the aesthetically creative disciplines such as architecture, as an individual’s contribution to the discipline will be made through the fecundity and generosity of their productions.

recognises and senses their own (undeniable) presence in that moment. That is, they realise they are present, and the situation of themselves and the building (together with its context) seems essentially available.

What role does creativity play in design? To a certain degree therefore, design is the process of creativity. However, in the context of this discussion, creativity is essential to design. Its intensity varies but creativity is essential, if not synonymous, with the design process. The scale of a work’s creative presence—that is, its capacity to affect situations and contexts outside the immediate vicinity of the work—gives us a measure of the profundity and fecundity of the design process and, if you like, the creative process.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? As described earlier, it is the presence of this confluence between requirements and possibilities that constitutes both process and production as creative. This is the intellectual and intuitive area that Louis Kahn described, I think quite beautifully and accurately, as the meeting of ‘silence and light’. He also called it the place ‘where the measureable and the unmeasureable’ meet. He calls this ‘the realm of the possibilities’. When one operates in this area, then one’s actions are creative.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? In an academic/educational situation, yes—though I am not sure of the worth of evaluating it out of this situation; surely the product will be the measure. In the academic/educational situation, assessment of creativity and discussion of the creative processes is important, as we can then discuss with others the means and methods whereby the influences of potential contributors to the possibilities (and in some senses the requirements) can be explored. By this process the richness of the connections between requirements and possibilities can be discussed, illustrated, and enacted. Creativity should be assessed in the aesthetically creative disciplines such as architecture, as an individual’s contribution to the discipline will be made through the fecundity and generosity of their productions.

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Des Smith

One’s initiating engagement with design requires an understanding of, and familiarity with, the positive attitudes of creativity.

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I would argue that there is an essentially positive respect required for the creation of buildings, and one needs familiarity with the process to appreciate the richness of this positive embodiment. One’s initiating engagement with design requires an understanding of, and familiarity with, the positive attitudes of creativity.

Ian Solomonides macquarie university

What is ‘creativity’?

Associate Professor Ian Solomonides is the Director of the Learning and Teaching Centre at Macquarie University in Sydney. Originally from the UK, Ian completed a Bachelor of Education with Honours as a mature student before obtaining a PhD in Engineering Education. Prior to coming to Australia in 2006, Ian was the Program Leader for the BA Honours Furniture and Product Design degrees within the School of Design Architecture and the Built Environment at Nottingham Trent University, where he primarily taught critical studies and research methods. He was also the Learning and Teaching Coordinator for the School. Ian has maintained a personal research and supervisory interest in design and creativity and their intersections with student engagement. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Engineering Design and is an Executive Member of the Council of Australian Directors of Academic Development.

Creativity is often presumed to be manifest through ideation and production; that is, the act of creation yields some form of object, image or space (and perhaps also systems and software). Creativity is in this sense allied to innovation, where innovation is creative ideas made real. Moreover, we would hope that this thing is itself ‘creative’, in that it was novel or promoted some sublime feeling. Of course, the behaviour that leads to this production may also be termed creative, with all the associations made to the field of psychology in an attempt to understand it. Many authors believe it cannot be understood. Importantly for the student of design, creativity has an ontological dimension and so the maximisation of creativity has much to do with the student’s senses of being and transformation relative to the work he or she undertakes and the environment in which it happens. Creative engagement with ‘x’ therefore has a strong affective element and may be directly linked to other feelings such as confidence, self-knowledge or some form of strain (happiness or sadness). Creativity is then not only present in the individual, we also have to think of the student being able to ‘see’ creatively and to recognise creativity when they see it. Perhaps, then, it is more appropriate to think about the ‘creative imagination’ and, in this sense, to appreciate creativity through both the creator and the audience, as much as the process and product.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Clearly, furniture and product design affords the productive element described above, but there is also the critical or contextual study of design where creativity may be observed in the artefact or in the study of the artefact, designer or cultural context. This is central to my discipline: the idea that objects, images and spaces are born of and relate to their cultural origins (or the cultures they intentionally or accidentally find a place in), and that the study of creative people is inherently worthwhile. It is important that the student of design has an ability to read and understand product semantics, to make judgements about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ design, or to understand taste and a kind of Kantian or Adorno aesthetic: ‘high’

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Designers occupy a unique and privileged space and creative design has the freedom to visit many ideas and disciplines in the development of a solution.

versus ‘low’ art or ‘functional’ versus ‘expressive’ design etc. In relation to more pragmatic curriculum matters, critical studies in design have for too long focussed on high design and the functionality of elite objects at the expense of mundane products and the promotion of more pluralistic design for the common good. In my discipline, therefore, creativity is part of a critical discourse as students. Their lead-users look at, respond to, produce and talk about artefacts and, through interpretation, come to make judgements about their quality, expression, utility, value, place in culture, and so on.

What role does creativity play in design? There must be a link between what we might term ‘good design’ and creativity; whether through innovation, pragmatic problem solving or in critical and sensitive judgements made about aesthetics. Designers occupy a unique and privileged space and creative design has the freedom to visit many ideas and disciplines in the development of a solution. In doing so, and in order to be successful, be it through some form of heuristic, technique or something less defined, the amalgamation of ideas or balancing of constraints that we call design is a function of the creative imagination. Creativity is also about ‘being’ a designer so there is a professional identity element to this as well. I have argued elsewhere that students of design see themselves as part of the design community from very early on in their formation (Reid & Solomonides 2007; Solomonides & Reid 2009). Creativity and sense of engagement with the profession and task are therefore somehow mutually supportive and reciprocal. Similarly, the creative imagination and application of it are part of design thinking; without it, design would be unable to make the creative connections and transformations it has made into what is now a wide variety of other disciplines and practices. These processes are changing relative to opportunity and so today we see design thinking (and creativity) applied in various levels of enterprise, from design for competitive advantage within business and product development, through to socio-constructive and collective cooperations within communities of need.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? Biographical studies of those culturally regarded as creative give some insight into the complex nature of the creative imagination. Picasso is creative because his work relates to our notions of originality and his art routinely produced images outside visual reality. The creative person

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Ian Solomonides

At the heart of this issue is the need to make an inference from what is observed in the product; as a vicarious experience, or through the student’s articulation of the creative design process.

is one who produces something that represents their viewpoint but at the same time is original. The work is distinctive, discriminated from what has gone before. It is defined by its technical quality and quality of insight. Here, technical quality is manifest in the artefact and not in the person, whilst quality of insight is evident in both. Technically at least, the creative imagination will probably best operate in the area in which its owner possesses the appropriate skills of process and production (which is presumably where teaching and the learning environment comes into play!). I am suggesting the creative imagination operates within various conditions; there is always a product and this is inextricably linked to process. The process can include the development of many ideas and solutions to a problem. The creative solution will be one that is an outcome of the creator’s own reasoning, is original and has an element of quality of insight, along with notions of originality, novelty and distinction. These last points hint at what might be assessed.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? At the heart of this issue is the need to make an inference from what is observed in the product; as a vicarious experience, or through the student’s articulation of the creative design process. Clearly this requires a framework of formative and summative assessment, but it will require some rethinking around the setting of educational curriculum objectives, allowing greater flexibility in assessing what the student actually learned, which could be different to what was intended. Most objectives are articulated through terminal learning outcomes: things the student will be able to do at the end of a unit, rather than outcomes that might better accommodate or balance product with process and the unexpected outcome. Design has been able to utilise other opportunities, group and individual critiques for example, where students openly discuss works in progress. Bringing critical studies into these events would be a powerful way of blending theory and practice together with the skills of critical discourse and the verbalisation of creativity in action. The other part of the assessment issue is the rubric and the evaluation criteria as these must also support the use and expression of the creative imagination. Here there are great opportunities for negotiated learning outcomes, learning contracts and rubrics developed with the individual or the group; it is after all the group or individual that must agree and understand what creativity means within a particular domain of learning if they are to be judged against it.

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Mark Taylor queensland university of technology

What is ‘creativity’?

Mark Taylor is Associate Professor of Interior Design at Queensland University of Technology and has taught interdisciplinary design studios in both design and creative industries. Various outcomes from his research-led teaching have been published in journals (e.g. Taylor 2007), books (e.g. Taylor 2010) and exhibited internationally (e.g. Taylro 2008). His research has been published widely. He is the editor of Surface Consciousness (Taylor 2003) and, with Julieanna Preston, he co-edited Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (2006).

Creativity is the ability to rethink ideas and present an alternative approach to existing ways of seeing. It includes the capacity to re-image processes from both disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, and operates at both theoretical and practical levels. As such, it is involves imagining the virtual potentials of an existing condition and reframing their actuality in a manner that is novel. Here I am referring to ‘newness’ rather than the construction of ‘novelty’—a poor substitute for innovation. To this extent creativity seeks innovative responses to situations and processes and encourages risk-taking.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Creativity assists shifting perspectives and is not limited to problem solving. It provides a platform for propositional thinking that enables abstractions and generalised concepts to emerge. Though some argue that the tools and techniques (including representational skills) are important to creative processes, this is not always the case. They might assist when translating creative ideas into creative practice, but this is conditioned by understanding design as a research method. However, particular methods can lead to a repetition of ideas/artefacts and hence the need to identify how and where shifts in thinking have occurred for identification of creativity.

Mark recently co-convened with Professor Gini Lee the international IDEA symposium entitled Interior Spaces in Other Places. He is currently editing a four volume series entitled What role does creativity play in design? Interior Design & Architecture: Critical & Primary Sources (Taylor Creativity is non-linear and is present at various stages of the 2012) and is completing his PhD design process. It encourages propositional responses, stimulated by at The University of Queensland. individual and collective analysis of client’s expectations, local climate

conditions (constraints, data and information), and the designer’s wider conceptualisations. Creativity is sometimes apparent in design outcomes, but there are occasions where it has informed a methodology or shaped a process, rather than the product/artefact. Creativity is therefore not subject to linear processes but emerges through particular conceptualisations that may be ‘fleetingly’ apparent at the time.

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What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative?

Mark Taylor

Creativity is sometimes apparent in design outcomes, but there are occasions where it has informed a methodology or shaped a process, rather than the product/artefact.

In the creative design process, new conceptions are generated that contribute to the advancement of a disciplinary body of knowledge. The actions that bring this about include the redistribution of ideas and/or the realisation of these as new artefacts. That is, creative actions reflect the extent to which new knowledge and experience has informed ideas/ products in a manner that was not apparent at the outset.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Creativity can be assessed but is dependent on particular frames of reference. To measure the design process is difficult as sometimes the process is unclear even to the author. However, the outcome is often tested against a criterion that seeks difference from the predictable and traditional. This is not to advance an idea that creativity is wilful, but to understand that it responds to the logic of the argument that is speculated through the research material—whether this is via visual/literature evidence or procedural design investigation.

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William M. Taylor university of western australia

What is ‘creativity’? As the range of contributions to this book suggests, ‘creativity’ is hard to define, at least with any precision or general agreement on terms. This is William M Taylor is Winthrop partly because any likely definition requires an exercise in creativity itself, Professor of Architecture at particularly imaginative, speculative or propositional thinking (or all three the University of Western kinds of intellectual activities at once and maybe others) on a topic that Australia where he is teaching architectural design and history, will take different forms. Also, it seems hard to separate an understanding as well as theory of the built of what creativity ‘really is’ from what ‘it does’ relative to a point in time, environment. His most recent to a given culture and task(s) at hand. Rather than aiming for greater book, co-authored with Michael clarity of terms and consensus on what the subject is, we should perhaps Levine, is titled Prospects focus on the key issues or common concerns behind the question ‘what is for an Ethics of Architecture “creativity?’; as these highlight an ethical domain for interrogating human (Taylor & Levine 2011). identity, character and values. Most thoughtful people are likely to reject Other work includes The Vital the notion that creativity arises spontaneously, independently of selfLandscape, Nature and the Built awareness and self-examination, training and other mitigating factors. Environment in NineteenthCentury Britain (Taylor 2004), an Consequently, we can ask: what does creativity, and our thinking and writing about creative acts, tell us about ourselves and our society, and edited collection The Geography of Law, Landscape and Regulation what we would like one or the other (or both) to be? (Taylor 2006), and a co-edited book with Phillip Goldswain An Everyday Transience: The Urban Imaginary of Goldfields Photographer John Joseph Dwyer (Goldswain & Taylor 2010). He is currently researching the subject of architecture and transience and preparing a collection of essays on architecture, ships and the sea.

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How does creativity present itself in your discipline? In architecture and related design disciplines, thinking about creativity, about the sources for inspiration in the studio, on the drawing board or computer, or about the methods devised to make design a more precise and rigorous process, commonly elicits a philosophy or view of human nature or more likely, several views. It is this philosophy, about our performance as designers or about our clients, whether ‘real’ or imaginary, as the beneficiaries of design, which imparts something of an order and coherence to architecture as a discipline. It is a philosophy that distinguishes between the forces that compel us to feel, think and act in certain ways—forces from ‘within’ ourselves—and those factors which enhance or limit our opportunities for doing so—those from ‘without’. By this means, one creates buildings valorised by their association with such ‘facts’ as a uniquely human desire for wholeness or connectedness with the world, by an innate facility for remembering and forgetting or by

We seek to describe creative practices entailed in ‘design’ that are selfformative, morallyefficacious and directed toward images of a whole or fully-integrated person.

a distinctive capacity for communion with one another—amongst other views of a humankind’s distinctiveness. At times, architectural theory makes these needs and others like them the subject of speculation and complement to everyday appeals to ‘lifestyle’ and the ‘quality of life’, while practitioners routinely imagine themselves to be enhancing their client’s lives through design.

What role does creativity play in design? In our forthcoming book, Prospects for an Ethics of Architecture (Taylor & Levine 2011), my co-author Michael Levine and I write that design is one means whereby our needs and desires are recognised as such. Concerning the particular kind of ‘ethics’ we call upon in writing this book, at least two understandings of the term are brought into view. We elicit both and work between them. Firstly, our study calls upon ethics as a branch of philosophical inquiry, particularly moral philosophy, but attempts to go beyond its specific concerns and terms, speculation and rhetoric. Secondly, while calling upon ethics as an academic discipline, we aim to identify a broader domain of thought about human beings as distinctly moral creatures. We seek to describe creative practices entailed in ‘design’ that are self-formative, morally-efficacious and directed toward images of a whole or fully-integrated person. Along with the personal, such practices engage different kinds of knowledge (not just those that make for specialist knowledge of academic and professional disciplines) and have social and political implications as well. Architecture and the built environment contribute to the inculcation of all sorts of values (good and bad).

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? The more interesting question is whether and how thinking about creativity leads us to an understanding of what ‘makes’ a person. Perceptions of creativity, in one’s self, in others or in a designed object like a house or work of art call upon patterns of awareness and sentiment, but also moral judgement and discourses that make these perceptions and the values that go with them ‘real’ for a given culture and moment in time. History comes into play here and so the study of history is inseparable from understanding what creativity is ‘all about’. For example, about the same time that aesthetics became a narrow academic discipline (concerned with, amongst other things, the nature of creative works like architecture and art), the notion of an ‘aesthete’—a derivative term

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History comes into play here and so the study of history is inseparable from understanding what creativity is ‘all about’.

which appears in English usage by the 1880s—acquired a distinctively ethical connotation in broader society. People thought to have a highly refined and studiously acquired appreciation of beauty and the arts could be praised or condemned for being one. One’s orientation towards those attributes of creative objects or domain of sensibilities labelled ‘aesthetic’, supported judgements of far wider application than formerly confined by an erudite education and the musings of Oscar Wilde or John Keats. The ideas of the Aesthetic Movement in late nineteenth century England resonated elsewhere in promoting aesthetic sensibility above all other forms of experience as fundamentally ‘better’ or more insightful into the human condition. The modernist doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’, which drew on this earlier movement, supports the judgement that an exercise of creativity alone (in art, literature, architecture or other media) rather than any particular value arising from a given work of art is inherently, morally worthy. Equally, the idea of gesamtkunstwerk or the ‘total work of art’ was intended to describe a comprehensively designed and formally coherent work providing for the moral integrity of its producers (the artist or architect) as well as the improvement of its users, viewers or inhabitants. The positive re-appraisal of indigenous art and vernacular architecture, most notably by modernist artists and architects, resulted from the belief that it was a particular kind of creative enterprise— supposedly autochthonous and wanting in self-conscious intent or pretence—that was praiseworthy. Artwork that seemingly lacked an obvious, self-conscious aesthetic was given in evidence of the supposed, superior character of non-Western or ‘native’ peoples.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Yes, it can be, though again, only in view of the sentiments, discourses and history that determine just what creativity is or can be and, by extension, just what kind of person we want to be (and what kind of society we would like to make) in exercising our creative abilities and aspirations. Aesthetics, for instance, featured in the lexicon of the classically-trained architect and the learned elite during the Enlightenment, but also points towards the concerns of our own times. It encompasses the more everyday language of building characterising a long period of industrialisation, urbanisation and the increasing diversity and division of labour. It underscores claims for the distinctive cultural value of architecture as opposed to more prosaic buildings which seem less than creative. The

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William M. Taylor

Aesthetics, for instance, featured in the lexicon of the classicallytrained architect and the learned elite during the Enlightenment, but also points towards the concerns of our own times.

distinction itself may partly account for the desire to philosophise about architecture and creativity—a tendency to underscore the value of either through abstract or speculative means.

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Photo by Patrick Reynolds Photography Ltd.

Sarah Treadwell the university of auckland

What is ‘creativity’?

Associate Professor Sarah Treadwell is the Head of the School of Architecture and Planning at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has over 20 years of experience teaching in architectural design studios and lecturing on issues of media and architectural representation. Her research involves the representation of 19th century South Pacific and New Zealand architecture and she also writes on contemporary fine art practices that reference architecture. Sarah’s recent publications address writing practices that formally engage with architecture. Allied to her research on architectural media is a research project concerning conditions of oceanic ground undertaken through art practices.

Creativity is a burden, a blessing and an elusive chimera. Historically, it is a newly arrived concept becoming popular after World War II. In light of its suspect siren calls for originality and genius, creativity has subsequently been critically examined and recognised as snare and delusion. Attached to the art market in current times, creativity is also commonly associated with business and the booming self-help industries. As a term, ‘creativity’ seems fraught with saturation and evacuated meaning. However, despite a history of both valorisation and denial, it is a persistent term that cannot be avoided in the art and design disciplines. Rather than being a received attribute associated with a particular talented individual, creativity might be more usefully seen in design studios as a precondition that operates with openness and activates potential; creativity as an empty precursor to making. Faced with the blank screen, creativity, as a starting point, offers insecurity in its absence and a sort of terror when it is manifest. It cannot be forced or coerced and it is not possible to drive or employ creativity; rather it may be solicited or recognised. Creativity might be valued just for itself—as excess, a condition, spatial or temporal, with no end in sight, and with no virtues in its operations. The excessive flare of a match in the dark does not aid recognition of what is already known, but in the brightness of a phosphorus glare there is a bleaching out of the expected. New forms, shadowed with the old, are imagined in the consequent darkness of a flaring match. As a surplus welling up of excess, creativity endlessly conditions the practices of the ordinary and the everyday. Daily offerings created with flowers, leaves and words, the laying of a dining table, the polishing of a car’s metal surfaces; events subject to a careful induction of atmosphere with words, bodies, events. A mother is creative in the literal making of a child—thereafter she is beset with obligations, restrictions and an absence of time (anathema to creativity). The everyday consumes creativity with small duties but sometimes in the repetition of daily chores, in the emptiness of habitual actions, creativity

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What is needed at the moment of expansiveness, the time just before boredom, when possibilities fleetingly alight, is a speedy sort of craft.

unexpectedly surfaces. In solitude, just prior to the point of boredom, before the closing mind sinks into apathy, ideas, patterns, desires, well up in a full tide that swells following the parched restrictions of low tide, in an abundance of potential yet to be tested.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Creativity is required and expected in the design disciplines such as architecture—to admit its absence would be to declare an infirmity, a lack of sensitivity. And yet creativity seems remote from the virtues of productivity associated with architectural practice—the capitalist virtues of hard work allied to progress and achievement. As practitioners we know, to our cost, that creativity can be ignored for habitual practices, routine, repetition of the known and expected. Creativity is expensive, disruptive, and the screen falls into patterns from the past with alarming alacrity. Seemingly remote from the consumer driven values of acquisition and achievement creativity might however register as a luxury—a desirable commodity to be consumed—even as we know that it is an unpredictable necessity for shaping new patterns of the future.

What role does creativity play in design? If creativity is an empty potential, if it is a precursor to invention, the question is; how to open design practices to the operations of creativity seen as instruction, imagination or gift? What is needed at the moment of expansiveness, the time just before boredom, when possibilities fleetingly alight, is a speedy sort of craft. Craft that makes provisional material propositions that test the offerings that splurge out of a racing brain. Models, drawings, writing, produced without censorship, guided by hunch, intuition, as a provocation of the existing. Accessed with craft, creativity incites a skilful making that is a refusal of habit, a denial of the already shaped. Models overflow the tables, clog up the screen, to be scrutinised in terms of programme, site or budget.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? How to recognise actions subject to creativity? Laughter shares with creativity an ability to reveal hidden similarities according to Arthur Koestler (1965: 94), who also recognised divergent thinking and the ability to combine previously unrelated ideas as conditions of creativity. Categorical instability, testing of limits, disruption of norms have all been associated with creativity at various times while creativity now might be

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seen to constitute a business practice, a form of inward interrogation of self or a strategic alliance with the art industries.

Sarah Treadwell

Creativity can only be solicited, encouraged, coaxed; we need to cultivate it—let it into the studio as an unreliable but fertile atmosphere.

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To distinguish creativity in design and art practices is, in part, to observe a crafting of architecture despite rules and routine—despite the weight of relentless bureaucracy; a crafting of architecture undertaken as a ruthless testing and refinement of ideas generated in productive abundance. Creativity also can be recognised in terms of collective enactment; it is not the creative individual who troubles existing patterns and causes rethinking but a collective understanding that might creatively change the moment or the world.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Creativity can only be solicited, encouraged, coaxed; we need to cultivate it—let it into the studio as an unreliable but fertile atmosphere. Creativity is fleeting, difficult and unpredictable and only a precursor to some sort of making. Making doesn’t need creativity; material objects can come into being through template, pattern, copy, and routine. We cannot assess creativity, just the things that it makes or changes, and they get assessed with parameters of the formal, programmatic, technical and representational. We assess the makings that emerge from work practices but creativity itself is seen only in its traces, residues, and its denials. Creativity might be recognised after time has passed. Looking back, it might be apparent that architecture is different because of small creative changes that have accumulatively wrought new inventive and innovative conditions.

Richard Tucker deakin university

What is ‘creativity’?

Dr Richard Tucker has taught design projects to interdisciplinary collaborative cohorts at both Deakin University and The University of Bath, UK. He has led four Strategic Teaching and Learning Grant Scheme funded projects at Deakin (totalling $110,000), and published extensively in the field of higher education. In 2007, Richard was awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the top teaching award at Deakin University; the WJC Banks Award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching and Learning. In 2007, Richard’s teaching scholarship was also recognised nationally by the award of a Carrick Institute Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning. In 2008, Richard was appointed as Associate Head of Teaching and Learning at Deakin School of Architecture and Building, a post he left in 2010 to become Associate Head of School Research.

Creativity has been defined ‘as the production of novel and useful ideas in any domain’. I would question the words ‘novel’ and ‘useful’ because, if the idea is ‘useless’ but new to the creator, the creator has still given birth to an idea via some form of creative process. I suggest, therefore, that ‘creativity’ is simply the production of ideas. But it is not quite that straightforward. Innovation is often distinguished from creativity as the successful implementation of ideas. Yet there is a creative process between the birth of an idea and its implementation—that is evolving/developing/ operating on an idea. This development of an idea is also creativity. I would therefore say that creativity is a two-stage process: it is, firstly, the production and, secondly, the development of ideas; where ‘production’ is understood as the initiating activities a designer undertakes to inform or inspire ideas.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? In architecture, creativity presents itself in the form of spoken and written words and designs—three-dimensional objects (real or virtual) and drawings (one definition of ‘design’ is, of course, drawing). Often, and most challengingly for assessors, an architectural design is presented in all of these mediums.

What role does creativity play in design? The differentiation of design from creativity is not straightforward. A simplification can be discussed in the following terms: cognitive psychology has defined design activities as problem solving where the problem is ill-defined and open-ended. Creativity in this design process is often characterised by the occurrence of a significant event—a ‘creative leap’. Thus, we may say that creativity in the process of solving an open-ended problem is the production of an idea, and the subsequent development of that idea, leading to significant progress towards a design solution. Most challengingly, it is often only in retrospect that the designer is able to identify the creative leap and that identification is often unreliable.

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Richard Tucker

Creativity can, I would argue, be assessed. For, although it is not possible to assess the quality of an event understood as a ‘creative leap,’ we can assess the quality of its outcome; i.e. the idea.

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What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? Accepting my previous definitions, a person’s actions are creative if they inform or inspire an idea or move that idea towards a design solution or other outcome.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Creativity can, I would argue, be assessed. For, although it is not possible to assess the quality of an event understood as a ‘creative leap,’ we can assess the quality of its outcome; i.e. the idea. It is also possible to assess the quality of the design process that follows an idea; i.e. how a designer operates on the idea. It is less easy, although possible, to assess the activities the designer undertakes to initiate the creative leap. Thus, although we cannot assess the creative leap, we can assess the actions that preceded it to inform it, we can assess its outcome (the idea) and we can assess the process that occurs after the leap that progresses the idea toward a design solution. I suggest that our problems in assessing creativity are largely concerned with those forms of creativity that we most closely associate with the ‘creative leap’, such as invention, imagination and risk-taking.

Robyn Tudor the university of new south wales

Dr. Robyn Tudor is a University of New South Wales Academic Fellow, Collage of Fine Arts (COFA) Director of Learning and Teaching Enhancement and National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) Board member. Her research into Creativity: A Higher Order Capability explores how creativity is made teachable in art and design education with creative pedagogy and practice underpinning a varied career in visual arts, design, education and creative industries.

What is ‘Creativity’?

Robyn has led change management and quality assurance in creative learning and teaching at postgraduate, undergraduate and vocational levels in Australia and overseas. She represented Australia in EU/ OECD collaborations and UNESCO affiliated Global University Innovation Network (GUNI) in Barcelona plus commissions for professional associations, industry, cultural institutions, government and private HEPs— with disciplinary experience in curriculum design, development and program implementation in creative technology and entertainment; jewellery, fashion, textiles, interior, graphic and

How does creativity present itself in your discipline?

Creativity is a fully embodied, generative, adaptive and iterative human attribute that enables individuals, groups and teams of people to learn from the experience of self and others to act on opportunity, challenge and change. Creativity is a freely flexible, multivalent and open-ended process for dealing with perplexity and potentiality—exploring what might be possible, using what is known (or can be discovered) to help understand and progressively resolve that which is wholly or partially unknown. Creativity is a future-oriented way of experiencing, acting and living in the world that draws upon human instinct, intuition and intellect to envisage, evaluate and devise enacted strategies for intentionally influencing the evolving academic, social, cultural and material environments we collectively inhabit.

In visual art and design, creativity presents itself as a purposeful (re)visioning and (re)formation of images, objects, contexts and applications that strive to interrogate both aesthetic and pragmatic considerations. Creativity in fine art actively explores meaning making by seeking to stimulate and facilitate new and reflective aesthetic and conceptual experiences for particular audiences, often by challenging prior assumptions, interpretations and beliefs and reworking past certainties. Creativity in design is more closely linked with the process, form, material, structure and purpose of products including a quest for continuous improvement and redefinition of social and cultural artefacts and environments, often with some commercial or practical relevance for a range of end-users and other stakeholders.

What role does creativity play in design? Creativity in design is the attitudinal catalyst for holistic decision-making that both motivates and disciplines practitioners, producers and clients

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digital design; multimedia, animation, audio engineering and sound production, popular music and performance, photography, television and video production.

in the purposeful remaking of material processes, forms, devices, spaces and environments intended (for the most part) to improve the human condition and capitalise both socially and commercially on emergent technological capabilities. Creativity in design provides innovative and adaptive organising principles by which to methodically explore and refine multiple options, while concurrently self-managing calculated risk factors and learning from mistakes.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? Actions and products are creative if they generate intentionally new outcomes, understandings, insights, experiences or capabilities for the person or persons living those actions or generating those products. Opinion about broader social or cultural significance of that creative action or product is a function of the attention, importance, esteem and value attributed to it by other people. This ‘creative designation’ can operate within or outside a specific discipline in relation to a continuum of deemed local community significance or national merit or international consequence. Time impacts the sustained intergenerational and cultural perception of creative relevance where human efforts or outputs continue to resonate with contemporary society beyond the original era or other contextual frame of reference within which the act or product was brought into being.

Can creativity be assessed and if so how? Yes, creativity can be assessed, using well articulated, agreed and declared criteria, such as: ♦♦ relative success in realising practitioner and/or client specified creative intent; ♦♦ valid adaptation or value-added deviation from accepted precedent in the field; ♦♦ inventive, novel, unique or unanticipated attributes that positively differentiate or improve the action or product from standard practice and outputs; ♦♦ identifiable contribution to enhancing knowledge, skill, understanding or interpretation stemming from the action or product; ♦♦ alternate approach, configuration of components or use of materials

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Robyn Tudor

Creativity in design provides innovative and adaptive organising principles by which to methodically explore and refine multiple options, while concurrently selfmanaging calculated risk factors and learning from mistakes.

that satisfactorily resolves a problem or meets a challenge with aesthetic, functional or structural integrity; ♦♦ consensus amongst peers of clear points of difference and coherence that renders the action or product superior to the norm in specified ways appropriate to the endeavour; ♦♦ evidence of a reasonable degree of independent experimentation, analysis, evaluation and reflection that informs (ongoing) development of a personalised mode of execution, stylistic treatment or visual/conceptual vocabulary; ♦♦ demonstration of iterative strategies used to progressively refine multiple potential solutions that constructively incorporate information derived from both successful and failed investigations and/or experiments; and ♦♦ evidence of insightful leaps of understanding, interpretation or communication derived from individual, collaborative or communal engagement with conceptually, visually, technically or structurally challenging tasks or processes.

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Leon van Schaik rmit university

What is ‘creativity’?

Leon van Schaik AO LFAIA,RIBA, PhD, is Professor of Architecture (Innovation Chair) at RMIT University, a position from which he has promoted local and international architectural culture through design practice research and through advising on the commissioning of architects. Recent writings include monographs on John Wardle (2008) and Denton Corker Marshall (2008) and the books Spatial Intelligence (2008) and, with Geoffrey London and Beth George, Procuring Innovative Architecture (2010).

I use Howard Gardner’s (1999) definitions of creativity which distinguishes between the creativity that everyone has and exercises in the course of their daily lives, and ‘big C’ creativity, in which individuals seek to expand the boundaries of their discipline. Such creative persons share a natural history: ♦♦ they come from a locale removed, but in touch; ♦♦ they move to the city where they find peers with whom they explore a terrain, organising manifestoes, stimulating each other; ♦♦ they find a problem area, become isolated by a sense of breakthrough that is little understood even by the self, and crave cognitive and affective support; ♦♦ they maintain marginality, using ‘outsider’ status (sex, ethnicity, class, nationality, etc.), and shift course to intellectual marginality; ♦♦ they exploit apparent misfit or lack of smooth connections within the triangle of creativity (individual + domain + environment), and experience a thrill from being at the edge. I demonstrate in my book Mastering Architecture: Becoming a Creative Innovator in Practice (van Schaik 2005) how this holds true in architecture.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? ‘Big C’ creative architects push the boundaries of what we expect from architecture in given situations. I give a series of case studies in Mastering Architecture (van Schaik 2005) and in the book Procuring Innovative Architecture, which I co-author with Geoffrey London and Beth George (van Schaik, London & George 2010).

What role does creativity play in design? See above, but also my book Spatial Intelligence: New Futures for Architecture (van Schaik 2008), in which I discuss the role of the mental

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Leon van Schaik

In a vibrant field of endeavour in which intellectual change is taking place, actions and products contribute to the establishment of a creative discourse that, in the best of times, is engaged in a tri-polar debate with two other substantively different discourses.

space each person constructs in determining how they deploy their spatial intelligence in design.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? In a vibrant field of endeavour in which intellectual change is taking place, actions and products contribute to the establishment of a creative discourse that, in the best of times, is engaged in a tri-polar debate with two other substantively different discourses. This is also discussed in the above books.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? My thinking on this is part of my answer to the question above. If a work contributes to, or rather extends the definition of a creative discourse, it is big C creative. Connoisseurship is the process by which the extent of that contribution is judged: ‘the use of expert knowledge of a field [...] to identify objects in it, determine their quality, and assess their character [...] capacious visual memory aided by technical evidence [...]’ Science can tell us a painting had to be painted before 1400, but only connoisseurship can give us the understanding that it was painted by Giotto. Professional reviews, curated exhibitions and monographs are the vehicle by which connoisseurial positions are established in architecture. The current research policy of the AIA delimits this process accurately.

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Louise Wallis the university of tasmania

What is ‘creativity’?

Louise Wallis is a lecturer in architecture at the University of Tasmania. Her research and work interests align with design studio teaching and LBM studios. Louise has been project member for two ATLC grants: Understanding Architectural Education in Australasia (2008–09) and Assessing Creativity (2010–11), and is currently engaged in a doctoral study into Architectural Design Teaching Models in Australasia (2007–10) under the supervision of Associate Professor Anthony Williams and Professor Michael Ostwald. Over the past six years, Louise has been the Chair of the School of Architecture and Design Teaching and Learning Committee at the University of Tasmania, represented the School at Faculty Teaching and Learning meetings and she has been invited for two years to be on the University Teaching and Learning Committee. In 2006, Louise received a University of Tasmania Teaching Excellence Award.

Creativity is the act which enables the development of a novel or new idea or product that is deemed a valuable contribution within the intended field and judged so by its peers. This description draws from the contextualist approach, which claims that creativity does not solely exist within the individual, but is also informed, read and made within the environment and society. This argument implies that parts of creativity can be taught and developed over time with exploration and practice within the field (building of tacit knowledge and experience), and that it involves interaction or understanding of the intended audience. Some parts of creativity are also innate such as intrinsic motivation and personal traits.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Creativity is displayed in ideas and products, irrespective of whether they are realised in a built or unbuilt form. Creativity may also be demonstrated through different mediums; such as, drawing, modelling, written text and virtual realities. There is a distinction between how creativity is understood and judged within architectural education and the practice of architecture. In architectural education, students are only beginning to learn the processes of design, whereas practitioners are competent users (or masters) of these processes and benefit from the practice and realisation of built projects. Creativity in architectural education is therefore limited to the foundations of initial design processes. It can, and does, develop over five years with increasingly more sophistication, but lacks the feedback and experience gained from professional practice. The judgement of creativity at university serves to guide and inform students about their foundational learning in design, but ultimately this does not necessarily translate into creativity in architectural practice.

What role does creativity play in design? The role of creativity in architectural design education is to allow students to become aware of, and equip them with, a range of processes and approaches. These may assist the student, and act as a catalyst for

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The role of creativity in architectural design education is to allow students to become aware of, and equip them with, a range of processes and approaches.

ideas or lead to new ways of thinking. They may also assist students in the making of a proposition by looking at the immediate and relevant contexts/precedents, as well as exploring unexpected materials/mediums. The intended consequence is to allow the student designer to become more elastic in their thinking and judgement processes.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? A student’s actions, or the product of their actions, are viewed as creative when they fulfil the following interdependent components: ♦♦ they establish the key parameters that underpin the idea or proposition (past and present) and determine the core or value of the idea/proposition, and the possibilities and opportunities that are presented; and, ♦♦ they make propositions that draw from precedent analysis and that modify, introduce, subtract or re-envision from an informed position and contribute a new or novel approach in a coherent, holistic and integral manner.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? I believe that parts of creativity can be assessed in architectural design education and that this is important. The foundations of creative thinking and design thinking can be demonstrated by students in their work by the clear articulation of their understanding of the project/problem and interpretation of current and past precedents (whether they may be buildings or drawn from other fields). The solution proposed by the student should illustrate the catalyst or opportunity provided by the interpretation of precedents, brief, context and other stimulus that lead to a new and novel solution (contribution). These descriptions would be explained in an assessment rubric. I believe it is important to foster and nurture creativity and to provide students with new ways to think critically and analyse the status quo. Students should be assessed in such a manner that they are informed regarding their development in terms of appropriateness and sophistication. I do not believe that the criterion of creativity should be heavily weighted. This is because learning to be creative takes time and experience and there are number of other skills and processes that are learnt in conjunction. For this reason, I believe that assessment of

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creativity should not be an overriding factor that distinguishes the design studio work from the distinction between a fail and pass.

Louise Wallis

...I believe that assessment of creativity should not be an overriding factor that distinguishes the design studio work from the distinction between a fail and pass.

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In my own teaching, creativity has never been singled out as an assessment criterion but forms part of the description in the assessment rubric in distinguishing achievement levels, particularly at the distinction and high distinction level.

Julie Werner rmit university

What is ‘creativity’? The term ‘creativity’ usually refers to the production, generation or development of something original, new or novel. The assessment of Julia Werner is a lecturer in ‘novelty’ is generally dependent on both the creator and the context in landscape architecture at the School of Architecture and Design which the creation takes place. For a long time, creativity was surrounded by an aura that suggested it involved something extraordinary or at RMIT University in Melbourne. Before starting at RMIT in 2009, inexplicable, but in contemporary life, it has become a major focus and she worked as a lecturer and requirement for nearly every profession. researcher at the Faculty for Architecture and Landscape Science at the University of Hanover, Germany, from where she also holds a Master of Landscape Planning and Design.

Julia is the co-founder of Studio Urbane Landschaften, a multidisciplinary laboratory and network for design in research, teaching and practice, which is connected to the University of Hanover and has over 25 members. At the Studio Urbane Landschaften, Julia worked on the creation of an innovative landscape design research-led teaching concept, and played a decisive role in developing the contemporary, interdisciplinary design approach outlined in Creating Knowledge: Innovation Strategies for Designing Urban Landscapes (2008). With several studio teams, she worked on design research projects for urban (water) landscapes and public spaces in Germany and

The Latin term creatio is the origin of both the terms creativity and creature, and creativity can be seen as a fundamental attribute of all creatures to develop and continue life. Thus, biologists describe creativity first and foremost as a continuously productive process of adjustments by an individual of any species to its environment, not as an outstanding feature of human beings inspired by the muses. We know today that creativity is partly the result of innate talents, but that the emotional climate of socialisation is just as important. The ongoing question is: what allows creativity to emerge? In addition to an innate creative intelligence, emotional factors such as curiosity, interest and ambition are important and their development is mostly dependent on the surrounding environment of the (creative) individual. All children are born with a level of curiosity, but this is unspecified and needs fostering, shaping and focusing. Just as importantly, creativity is also an ongoing process of concentrated, critical, painful, and often exhausting work, which requires frequent and regular practice. When we study the stories and biographies of famous creative people, we can see that they are all hard workers. As part of their creative processes, they are not only tireless in inventing and producing ideas, but also in rejecting, screening, transforming and arranging them. Summing up, creativity is the result of a combination of talent, nurture and also discipline, which demands regular and sustained practice.

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internationally, the results of which she has also published. She is currently conducting her PhD on the subject of the potential of creativity in the design of large-scale urban landscapes.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Landscape architecture, which is the profession I work in, shapes open spaces or landscapes of very different scale dimensions. The interactions of urbanisation, globalisation and climate change have led to uncertain and unpredictable large-scale spatial structures, and a fundamentally new perspective is required to respond to these complex urban landscapes in a productive way. Large-scale planning usually emphasises rational thinking, which detracts from the more open-ended possibilities of a creative design approach. Using a creative approach from the outset allows us to engage with and strengthen our responses to the complexity of urban and regional space. We all perceive urban landscapes, either large or small, through our senses, in a holistic way. A strong creative approach to landscape architectural design involves accepting and trusting knowledge gained through intuition, sensations and emotions. Understanding all aspects of urban landscapes is already creative work as it is an interpretation, and thus an idea, which is the result of the interaction between the individual and the site. I argue that initial ideas can act as creative navigation aids to disentanglement, through the long and complex process of design. In emphasising this role of ideas, we can expand the idea of creativity in landscape architectural design so that it includes strategies and concepts, and thus goes beyond just objects.

What role does creativity play in design? Designing is a creative act and creativity is an evolutionary attribute of all humans. We all shape our world through our everyday activities. We plan and carry out our lives in all their functional, material and emotional, as well as social and aesthetic, dimensions. Most of this occurs intuitively as a subconscious process. Ideas follow one another, often imperceptibly, and then (unexpectedly) something new emerges. But it is only in a professional context that these processes are viewed as design (Seggern & Werner 2008). As such, designing can be understood as one expression of ‘the creative capacity of human beings to take an active role in the evolutionary shaping of the world’, which ’implies a responsibility to comprehend and transmit creativity’ (Seggern 2008).

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Julie Werner

A key concept here is gestalt, which allows us to view the creative process holistically; that is, as something involving the whole being.

Design is both process and product, and, as professional designers, our role crucially involves creating knowledge. This knowledge has two aspects to it: personal (emotional and embodied) knowledge, and more objectively reasoned knowledge. The most productive approach for a designer is to acknowledge and utilise creativity in all its aspects, which results in the creation of knowledge. This also allows for the accessing of novel ideas, which is essential for effective design. By advocating for creativity in its broadest sense, we can take an active and responsible role in responding to the design challenges of the present and the future.

What makes a person’s actions or the products of their actions creative? As I have already stated, all of us are somehow creative in the way we carry out our lives. However, creativity as a specifically productive category requires more refined personality traits. While everyone is born with some degree of creative potential, some are able to develop this more than others, due to a range of factors and attributes. And, as already discussed, creativity is very much a process. Being creative is not just about an inspirational moment or a final product—acting out the process that leads from inspiration to product is just as crucial. A key concept here is gestalt, which allows us to view the creative process holistically; that is, as something involving the whole being. It describes the way people use and shape materials, systems and/or ideas in order to create something new. An unavoidable part of this process is the necessity of facing the creative void, or the ‘blank page’. A person’s willingness to directly confront this emptiness, and develop a relationship with it, is a key indicator of their creative success. A person’s creative action is never a linear process, but involves setbacks, frustrations and interruptions. One must be willing to negotiate with the unknown, to sit with it, rather than reject or withdraw from it. The whole person is involved in this process and it calls upon traits such as: security, self-confidence, patience, commitment, devotion, imagination, non-conformism, openness to new ideas and feelings, and willingness to take risks and come up with unforseen strategies.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? Assessment is necessary in all forms of education, but it is particularly tricky in creative areas, as the issue is also tied up with the extent to which

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creativity can be taught at all. Both questions I answer with ’yes’ and put the focus on ’how’ we teach creativity and hence how we access it.

Julie Werner

As creative design outcomes rarely ‘just happen’ without hard work, assessing final products also includes the individual creative process.

Ultimately, the question of talent must be set aside and teaching in creative areas has to instead concentrate on environmental factors—as they are the only ones we can change or influence. During my design teaching and research experiences in several (academic) environments, it has become evident to me that a setting that serves the essential components of design (the conscious combination of intuition, ratio, body and emotions) and that allows empathy (an involvement with and affection for the subject matter), will promote a creative atmosphere and thus the emergence of ideas. To this end, a certain amount of courage to get involved in open creative processes is essential, both on the part of the initiators of such activities (e.g. design teachers), and the respective participants (e.g. students). For me, a way to achieve this in design education is to invite students to concentrate on the creative process itself, not just final outcomes. As teachers, we can encourage students to practice their skills and work towards mastery, concentrating on their creative design process, as this is the essential foundation for strong ideas and thus for creative design outcomes—and assessing creativity in design education necessarily includes both of these. I suggest, one way to achieve extended creativity in students is to include the topic of creativity itself, and what it involves, in the curriculum— to make it part of students’ conscious methods and tools. That means learning about creativity in all its aspects, including how to deal with and negotiate chaos, complexity and uncertainty. As creative design outcomes rarely ‘just happen’ without hard work, assessing final products also includes the individual creative process. The important task in design teaching is to creatively stimulate and invite students to practice this process regularly. Acknowledging that final assessment is an inherently subjective task, team assessment for extended creative work is crucial. However, teacher and moderator, to some degree at least, bring both emotional and rational perceptions to bear in their assessment, as these approaches are inseparable and work best when consciously used together.

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Peter Wood victoria university of wellington

What is ‘creativity’?

Peter Wood is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture (Hons) and a PhD from the University of Auckland and has completed graduate studies in tertiary teaching and learning from Victoria University of Wellington. He teaches first and fifth year architectural design.

It is not very creative of me, but I can find no better definition than the one given by John Tusa (2003: 6), and I will simply repeat it here: creativity is ‘the exceptional act of imaginative discovery and expression in an art form’. That much, I think, we can easily agree on. However, Tusa’s point is sharper still. He suggests that ‘creative’ and ‘creativity’ are amongst the most debased words in the English language. Rather than being a standard of excellence, creative expression has become a banal right. All human beings are creative—so the popular view goes—the problem is finding one’s particular voice. Creativity has become synonymous with personal expression but the simplified effect of this democratisation has been to cast all expressive productivity as creative activity, which it is not. Good knitting requires skill, experience, knowledge, but it does not in itself require creativity, and nor does good architecture. To be successfully creative in the field of architecture requires exceptional imagination and expression, not everyday expressiveness and imagining.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Unfortunately, creativity does not present itself well in my discipline. It is too often sought in ‘newness’. Creativity produces novel solutions, but not always in the form of novel objects, and appearing new is not the same as being new. However, in a capitalist economy ‘newness’ has a market value. Point-of-difference marketing, product differentiation, branding—call it The Bilbao Effect—but locating a building’s creativity in its apparent unfamiliarity is the laziest of arguments. To determine if creativity— exceptional creativity—is evident, we need to first appreciate the set of parameters that defined the original problem. Creativity, in my view, occurs throughout the design process as a constant dialogue between every problem and its solution. But the fact is that the proliferation of images that accompany celebrated buildings tend to reinforce visual uniqueness to the exclusion of all other forms of architectural creativity, especially innovation, that are hidden within a design process.

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What role does creativity play in design?

Peter Wood

We are constantly assessing creativity, judging on the basis that we best know, what we like or do not like.

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I approach architectural design as a process concerned with identifying innovative and original solutions to clearly defined problems of an ‘architectural’ nature. In practice, most of these problems tend to be programmatic but they can equally be philosophical or expressive as long as they are tested against an architectural application (incorporating any mode of architectural communication). The two key components are ‘innovation’ and ‘application’. Creativity, I suggest, is the natural result of a successful union between the two, remembering that they both depend upon a problem in the discipline of architecture and not just the person of the architect.

What makes a person’s actions or the product of their actions creative? This question can be answered in one word: history. Genuine creativity is not just for the benefit of one project, one problem, or one designer. Exceptional creativity inevitably leaves an indelible mark, however faint, that is read by others. I would not go so far as to subject every building to the weight of architectural history as a measure, but I do think that genuine creativity leaves a pattern of traces, even if only in the continued work of an individual designer.

Can creativity be assessed and, if so, how? We are constantly assessing creativity, judging on the basis that we best know, what we like or do not like. Critical, criticism and critique, as terms of assessment mean little more than ‘judgement’ of this kind, and they tend to be moralistic in so much as a work of design is assessed as good or bad. A better question would be how we might find agreement in our judgements. That is, what universal standards could be identified and applied to identify exceptional examples of creativity? History is one example. A more immediate gauge is comfort, or lack of, by which I mean that genuine creativity will confront us as radical. While we use the word ‘critical’ with abandon, the term ‘radical’ has slipped, it seems to me, from our daily design practices in architecture. This is despite so many celebrated architects having radical beginnings: Koolhaas, Tschumi, Eisenman, Mayne and Rotondi, Diller and Scofidio, Coop Himmelblau, even—perhaps especially—Frank Gehry.

Part Three

A Multivalent Reading

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Matrixes Matrix 1 – Discipline and Approach Matrix 2 – Overarching Principles Matrix 3 – The 4Ps Matrix 4 – Key words Matrix 5 – Assessment

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Andresen

3

Casakin

3

Clark

3

3

Clayton

3

3

3 3

Cys

3

de la Harpe Demirkan

3

3

3

3

3

Dietrich

3

Dineen

3

Downton

3

3

Edmonds

3

Glanville

3

3

Heneghan

3

3

Hughes Kaji-O’Grady

3

3 3

Milton

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3

3

Maher Margalit

3

3

Lee Lozanovska

Theoretical

Pragmatic

Landscape

Industrial

Interior

Design

Architect

Matrix 1– Discipline and Approach

3 3

3

3 3

3

3

3

3

Missingham

3

3

Newton

3

3

Portillo

Theoretical

Pragmatic

Landscape

Industrial

Interior

Design

Architect Mina

3

3

Radford

3

Savage

3

Schnoor

3

3

Selenitsch

3

3

Smith

3

3 3

3

Solomonides

3

3

Taylor, M

3

3

Taylor, W

3

3

Treadwell

3

3

Tucker

3

Tudor

3 3

3

van Schaik

3

3

Wallis

3

3

Werner Wood

3 3

3 3

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Casakin

3

Clark

3

Clayton

3

Cys

3

de la Harpe

3

3

Demirkan

3

3

3

3

Scaled H/Pcreativity; High/low degree

Discipline specific phenomenon (different types)

3

Independent phenomenon

Andresen

Dietrich

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Rationalist principles

Romantic principles

Matrix 2– Overarching Principles

3

Dineen

3

3

Downton

3

3

Edmonds

3

Glanville

3

Heneghan

3

Hughes

3

Kaji-O’Grady

3

3

Lee

3

3

Lozanovska

3

3

Maher

3

Marglit

3

Milton

3

3 3 3 3

3

3 3

3

3

Missingham

3

Newton

3

3

Radford

3

3

Schnoor

3

3

Solomonides

3

Taylor, M

3

Taylor, W

3

3

3 3

3 3

van Schaik

3

3 3

3 3

Wallis

3

3

Werner

3

3

Wood

3

3

Smith

Tudor

3

3

3

Tucker

3

3 3

3

3

3

Selenitsch

Treadwell

3

3 3

3

Scaled H/Pcreativity; High/low degree 3

Portillo

Savage

Discipline specific phenomenon (different types)

Independent phenomenon

Rationalist principles

Romantic principles Mina

3

3

3 3

3

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Andresen

3

Casakin

3

3

3

3

Clark

3

3

3

3

Clayton

3

3

Cys

3

3

3

de la Harpe

3

3

3

Demirkan

3

3

3

3

Dietrich

3

Dineen

3

3

3

3

Downton

3

3

Edmonds

3

3

3

3

Glanville

3

3

3

3

3

3

Heneghan

3

3

Hughes

3

3

3

3

Kaji-O’Grady

3

3

3

3

Lee

3

3

Lozanovska

3

3

3

3

Maher

3

3

3

3

Margalit

3

3

Milton

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Press

Product

Process

Person

Matrix 3– The 4Ps

3

3

3

Process

Product

Press

Person Mina

3

3

3

Missingham

3

3

3

3

Newton

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Portillo Radford

3

Savage

3

Schnoor

3

Selenitsch

3

3

Smith

3

3

3 3

3

3

Solomonides

3

3

3

Taylor, M

3

3

3

Taylor, W

3

3

Treadwell

3

3

Tucker

3

Tudor van Schaik

3

Wallis

3

Werner Wood

3

3

3

3

3

3 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

165

Andresen 3

Clark

3

Clayton

3

Cys

3

de la Harpe

3

Demirkan

3

Dietrich

3 3

3

Downton

3

3

3

3

3

3

Re-create

Boudaries/Context

Future-oriented

Play/Curiosity/ Exploration

Risk

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3 3 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3 3

Kaji-O’Grady

3

3

3 3

Lozanovska

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3

3

Heneghan

Maher

Surprise

3

Glanville

Lee

Value

3

Edmonds

Hughes

Difference/Relative

Novelty/Freshness

Originality

Imagination

Opportunity seizing

Problem solving

Mastery (knowledge, skills, experience)

3

Casakin

Dineen

Intelligence

Ability

Approach

Matrix 4 – Key Words

3 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3 3

Margalit

3

Milton

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Missingham 3

Newton 3

Portillo 3

Savage 3

Schnoor 3

Smith

Taylor, M

Treadwell

Tudor

Werner

Wood 3

3

3 3

Radford

Selenitsch

3

Wallis 3

3

3

Solomonides

3

Taylor, W

3

3

3

3

3

Opportunity seizing

Problem solving

Mastery (knowledge, skills, experience)

Intelligence

Ability

Approach

3 3

3 3

3 3

3

3

3

3

3

3 3

3 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3 3 3

3 3 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

van Schaik

3

3 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Tucker 3 3

3 3

Re-create

Boudaries/Context

Future-oriented

Play/Curiosity/ Exploration

Risk

Surprise

Value

Difference/Relative

Novelty/Freshness

Originality

3 Imagination

Mina 3

3 3

3

3 3

3 3

3 3

3 3

3 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

167

3

3

Product

Process

Subjective

Pass/Fail

Rubrics/Metrics

Themes/Criteria

Comparison

Andresen

Team assessment/ Experts

(Partly) beyond assessment

Matrix 5 – Assessment

3

Casakin

3

3

Clark Clayton

3

Cys

3

de la Harpe

3

Demirkan

3

3

3

3

3

Dietrich Dineen

3

3

Downton Edmonds

3 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Glanville Heneghan

3

Hughes Kaji-O’Grady

3 3

Lee

3

Lozanovska Maher Margalit Milton

168

3

3 3

Missingham

3

Product 3

3 3

3

Radford Savage

3 3

Newton Portillo

Process

Comparison

Subjective

Pass/Fail

Rubrics/Metrics

Themes/Criteria

Team assessment/ Experts

(Partly) beyond assessment Mina

3 3

3 3

Schnoor Selenitsch

3

3

Smith Solomonides

3

Taylor, M

3

3

3

3

3

3

Taylor, W Treadwell

3

3

Tucker Tudor

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

van Schaik Wallis Werner

3

3 3

3

Wood

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Part Four

Reflections

Ken Friedman Photo by Lynette Zeeng

swinburne university of technology

Heuristic Reflections on Assessing Creativity in the Design Disciplines Ken Friedman is Professor of Design Theory and Strategic Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, and Dean of the Faculty of Design. He serves on the Council of the Design Research Society, and on the Executive Committee of Australian Deans of the Built Environment and Design. Active since 1966 in the international laboratory of art, architecture, design, and music known as Fluxus, he is also a practicing artist and designer. Friedman is represented in the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. In 2007, Loughborough University awarded Friedman the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, for outstanding contributions to design research.

Prologue The challenge of understanding creativity is the core issue in the research project Assessing Creativity: Strategies and Tools to Support Teaching and Learning in Architecture and Design. The project seeks to develop models for assessing creativity based on best practice in the design disciplines: architecture, design, interior design, and landscape. The first step in this project therefore involves understanding the nature of creativity itself, in order to appropriately assess it. This contribution is an ‘essay’ in the classical sense of the word defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘action or process of trying or testing’, a ‘composition of moderate length on […] [a subject] more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.’ It is heuristic as well: an attempt at discovery. What I wish to discover—to disclose and examine—involves a range of issues that we do not often address in the design disciplines. Reporting the findings of a 2008 study on architectural education in Australasia (Ostwald & Williams 2008a, 2008b), Hedda Haugen Askland, Michael Ostwald and

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Anthony Williams (2010) propose three major issues that impede the field: ‘[…] a lack of understanding of pedagogical dimensions of creativity in design; […] no appropriate strategies to understand where different levels of creativity occur and how they should be assessed; and […] a lack of appropriate models or tools to support assessment of creative works.’ While these challenges are significant, many people in the design field seem to believe that architects and designers know intuitively what creativity is and how to measure it, as well as knowing how to elicit the best and most creative efforts of their students. When many designers and architects discuss creativity, they echo St. Augustine’s (1961: 264) words on the subject of time: ‘I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.’ Where Augustine admits his perplexity, however, those in design and architecture education who cannot explain creativity tend to ascribe their lack of words to tacit knowledge or to a form of internalised expertise that requires no explanation. More problematic, many in design and architecture demonstrate little interest in taking on board what experts in other fields have learned about creativity and mastery. Scholars such as David Durling, Nigel Cross and Jeffrey Johnson (Durling 1996; Durling, Cross & Johnson 1996) have examined creativity and learning styles, contributing much to our understandings of creativity and its assessment. A multi-disciplinary approach to creativity is vital to any robust approach to creativity assessment. Yet, design and architecture professionals continue to overlook many of these contributions on creativity, or simply assume that they already understand the nature of creativity. Those who appeal to such innate forms of knowledge occasionally argue that no useful research in creativity exists, and that we must therefore invent this wheel ourselves—as though a century of research (Kaufman & Sternberg 2010) in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and the human sciences did not exist. It is my hope that this ALTC project will shed light on the challenges we face. This essay offers a sideways look at the issues of creativity that are often ignored. While one occasionally finds these assertions in conference papers or doctoral theses, they are more common as background beliefs stated in tearoom conversation or discussion lists. For this reason, there is little point in citing sources for these assertions—rather, I intend to address the issues they represent.

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Problematic assertions First, one of the problematic assertions that make it difficult to assess creativity is the notion that creative people cluster in certain fields to the disadvantage of others. While the claim is often heard, there is little evidence for this notion. Many people assume that designers, architects, and artists are creative in greater degree and proportion to their numbers than physicians, physicists, or philosophers. Since this is an essay and not a scientific paper, I do not intend to offer a complete argument against this claim. Society ascribes the properties of creativity to the arts, to architecture and design, as well as to those fields sometimes labelled as creative industries. These fields represent the qualities and properties of creativity for the societies they serve. It does not follow from this that the individuals in these fields are actually more creative than individuals in other fields. I argue for notions of creativity as a human quality that we find among the best practitioners of most professions, and that we see creativity distributed in fairly equal proportions across all fields. Second, there are significant problems and challenges in the practice and management of what we label as creative research outputs in design, architecture, and art. These problems rest on and emerge from the first claim. Without respect to the challenge of creative research outputs among academics in such research assessment exercises as Australia’s ERA, New Zealand’s PBRF, or the RAE in the United Kingdom, this issue affects a project such as this with respect to student research projects and higher degrees by research. In a recent meeting of Deans on the subject of research, I heard a Dean argue for the validity of creative research outputs on the basis that ‘art and design carry our culture.’ His claim was that we measure and accept many fields based on research, but that we cannot measure art, architecture, or design based on research. If the claim that ‘art and design carry our culture’ is true, it would not demonstrate the validity of creative research outputs. But this claim is only true in a limited sense: it is true, yet it is no more true than the similar claim one can make for mathematics, information technology, or politics. All human actions and institutions ‘carry our culture.’ Third, justifying creative outputs, and what are sometimes labelled practice-led doctorates, leads to another problem in our field: one can earn a PhD in design or

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architecture at some universities for an exhibition of artefacts and an essay. This requires what some faculties label studio research, redefining the basis of the PhD from an original contribution to knowledge, to a contribution to culture. This third problem has several faces. One face of this third problem is whether it is reasonable to accept a 20,000 or 30,000 word essay accompanying an exhibition as a doctoral thesis. Designating such an essay as an exegesis grants a level of scholarship to these essays that they generally do not deserve. While an exegesis is colloquially defined as a critical explanation of a body of work, a scholarly exegesis entails far more. Exegetics is a scholarly practice rooted in the arts of inquiry and translation that dates back to the schools of classical Athens and Hellenic Alexandria. In the millennia since that time, exegetics became the applied science or scholarship of hermeneutical inquiry in theology, law, geography, social science, and other forms of human communication. Hermeneutics and exegetics seek to establish correct or valid interpretation that permits readers to understand the meaning of a message, document, or text. We apply this by extension to artefacts or other human creations. By the fifth century CE, hermeneutics sought to disclose four senses of exegesis: literal meaning, allegorical interpretation, moral meaning with an emphasis on conduct in human affairs, and anagogical meaning pointing toward future application (Thiselton 1992: 183; see also de Lubac 1998). Exegesis is a powerful research tool. Applying hermeneutical methods requires discipline, deep learning, careful reading, and practice. These research methods reveal the voice of a subject other than the researcher. Hermeneutical methods seek to give the creators of a text or artefact his or her own voice while opening the world of the text or artefact to rich engagement by a reader. Skilled exegetes warn their student not to impose their own views or voice on the text or artefact. A research project in which the exegete is also the creator raises interesting problems—even though the researcher’s voice is, by definition, the voice of the creator, it may not be the legitimate voice of the text or the artefact, and it is definitely not the voice of those to whom the exegete seeks to open the world of the text or the artefact. One of the confusions surrounding some subjective or phenomenological research methods is the notion of appropriate subjectivity. The subjectivity of the researcher is not the issue in exegesis. Hermeneutical research discloses the subjectivity and

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understanding of those whose world we seek to understand, and it opens the artefact to the subjectivity of those for whom the artefact posits horizons of hermeneutical engagement. In some forms of philosophical or psychological inquiry, the internal world of the researcher is the central theme. This is so in self-therapy, for example, and in many forms of artistic or poetic inquiry. If the researcher is investigating his or her internal world, the researcher’s subjective voice and experience is the focus. This is not the purpose of exegesis. Some areas of research involving human beings are not about us as researchers. Those areas of research are about those whom we seek to understand or to serve. When we seek the voice of others in research, the point of research should be their subjectivity. It is their subjective experience, and not our own, that hermeneutics is intended to reveal. This is true of all research that seeks the voice of the other: design research, history, human ecology, anthropology, social psychology, and dozens of other fields. If our goal is simply hearing our own voice, we do not need a powerful and sophisticated research method such as exegesis. To voice our own thoughts, first-hand statements will do. But that, of course, is the real nature of the essay that accompanies an exhibition of artefacts for a creative PhD. Labelling this essay an exegesis substitutes a simple essay for a scholarly work by mislabelling it as research. And this involves a question on assessing creativity. Whether or not the essay explaining the work is deemed creative, there remains the question of what it does to contribute to knowledge, understanding, or culture. A thesis identifies a gap in the knowledge of a field. The researcher develops a research question. The thesis should demonstrate a credible answer to that question. The essay that accompanies the so-called PhD exhibition effectively demonstrates what the creator intends. While this may have value, it may equally well constitute an example of the intentional fallacy that has been the subject of critical and philosophical debate since the 1940s (Wimsatt & Beardsley 1943). The problem of the intentional fallacy is the claim that a work actually realises the creator’s intention, or, indeed, that the creator’s intention has anything to do with the effect the work has for those who read or respond to it. This is a massive challenge to assessing any creative research output when an essay lodges part of the claim for assessment.

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Not long ago, I heard the public examination of a studio research project submitted for a PhD. The exhibition presented half a dozen artefacts. These seemed modest. In quality, they would probably have qualified for the award of a studio master’s degree at some universities, though many require more than half a dozen artefacts. The candidate presented a talk from the thesis to explain the work. Despite using some grand terms and appealing to scholarly ideas with a heavy dose of Freudian terminology, the content seemed inconsequential to me. One of the examiners asked about using Freud and mentioning Freudian ideas in the thesis without substantiating the use of Freudian terms or anchoring them in the literature. The response was, ‘I could have done that if I had wanted to, but I didn’t think it was necessary.’ Following the presentation, the doctoral supervisor asked me what I thought. I said that I found it thin and puzzling. He explained to me that I did not understand the process. He said that the PhD is awarded for a submission in three parts: a thesis, an exhibition of artefacts, and the live examination. Since the candidate had passed, it seemed diplomatic to say nothing. Nevertheless, I was thinking that this professor had it wrong. The PhD contribution should be visible in the thesis without further support. If not, no one will be able to understand or make use of the research contribution, since they will not have the opportunity to see the exhibition or attend the examination. The purpose of the exhibition is simply to make it easy for visitors to see the body of work that ought properly to be reproduced in the thesis. And the purpose of examination is to allow examiners to better understand the thesis should they have questions. In this case, I could not discern a clear contribution, either to the knowledge of the field, or to the world of culture. This area involves an additional question with respect to self-analysis. Mature thinkers, such as psychologist Karen Horney or philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, make good use of self-analysis. These were mature, brilliant scholars. One was a practicing psychologist who developed the concept of self-analysis. The other was one of the greatest thinkers of the last two centuries. Ernest Becker (1997: 67–92) once described Kierkegaard as the first psychoanalyst. Can we expect this level of maturity and skill of a typical doctoral student in their early twenties? The final challenge once again involves assessment, and the question of determining whether the research is significant. How can we know that an exhibition of artefacts makes a doctoral-level contribution of substantial cultural significance? If we look back to any decade of history in design, art, or architecture, the vast majority of creators at any time are forgotten within a few decades. If this is the case, for example, with nearly

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99% of the names that appeared in the art magazines or design magazines of the 1960s, how can we possibly claim that a doctoral student whose work has not even achieved public recognition is making a contribution of cultural significance? There are many serious questions to ask about creativity in the context of Australian higher education. These are only a few of them, but these are challenging enough to require serious inquiry.

What is ‘creativity’? The Oxford English Dictionary (2010: unpaged) defines creativity in one of the shortest definitions in that extraordinarily long work: ‘[c]reative power or faculty; ability to create.’ So does Merriam-Webster’s (2010: unpaged): ‘1: the quality of being creative, 2: the ability to create.’ These definitions are deceptively simple. What does it mean to create? In mythic terms, it means to bring into being where nothing has been. This is the creation story of Genesis. But there are many kinds of creation and creativity. Bringing something from nothing is one among them. Another is creating from that which now exists, described as a metaphor in Shakespeare’s Tempest (Act II, Scene 1) where the actors speak of one who will ‘[…] carry this island home in his pocket […] and, sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands.’ In management studies, the distinction between these two kinds of creativity—radical innovation and incremental innovation—dates to the 1980s (see: Dewar & Dutton 1986; Ettlie, Bridges & O’Keefe 1984; Nord & Tucker 1987). Human beings have attempted to understand the nature of creativity since classical times. One aspect of creativity involves mastery of a medium. This takes time and practice. Several recent studies describe opportunity, access to an expert mentor, and extensive deliberate practice—skilled practice with coaching—as the difference between ordinary practitioners and those who become masters (Colvin 2008; Gladwell 2008; Syed 2010). This is one face of creativity, and situated knowledge is crucial to the deep skill that serves as the foundation of durable creativity. One must practice, drill and exercise to drive a car, master a sport, learn a language, develop an unconscious sense for mathematical patterns, play a musical instrument—or handle many of the technical craft tasks required of a designer.

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Mastery, however, involves more than situated knowledge. Mastery requires the ability to look deeply into the ingrained patterns and analyse them. This is what distinguishes the master from the technician. Here, we speak of the great racing driver, the athletic champion, the person who has engaged the spirit of a language to move beyond daily use or fluency to eloquence, the insightful mathematician. In each of these fields, as in music or design, one sees a range of talent that varies from no knowledge whatsoever, to the deep competence that characterises expertise. The journey from apprenticeship to mastery always passes through analysis and the ability to articulate the necessary knowledge. Several of the great creative works of the Twentieth Century illustrate different meanings of the concept of creativity. One is Picasso’s Suite Vollard, an astonishing masterwork that encapsulates and summarises a history of art as Picasso saw it in the 1930s. In these works, Picasso gives free rein to the plastic sense of line in space, collapsing an archaeology of time into the frame of each among the one hundred etchings in the suite. Another aspect of creativity is looking at what others have seen and described to understand facts in a profoundly different way. One example of this is Einstein’s (1998: 85–98) famous paper on Brownian motion. This is the paper that established the physical reality of atoms. Einstein examined well-understood facts that physicists and chemists had long accepted, bringing them together with well-known observations. But this paper was radical because it reframed these facts and observations in a way that shed light on a basic physical problem that had not hitherto been solved (See also: Stachel 1998). The tough nature of creativity comes into sharp focus when research requires us to reframe a problem entirely by recasting earlier challenges in a new light. Einstein is a good example of this as well, and Einstein’s great papers of 1905 show how it is possible to look in new ways at what others have seen and discovered, to find new and startling results. Of course, Einstein is also known for another kind of creativity, and the work that led to it relied on deep physical intuition combined with a rigorous sense of inquiry that drew on Euclidean logic and a philosophy of science anchored in Hume. In two of his five great papers of 1905, Einstein shaped the theory of relativity, paving the way to our modern understanding of physics in a paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies (Einstein 1998: 123–160), the relationship between inertia and energy content

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(Einstein 1998: 161–164), while another paper contributed to quantum theory by examining the production of light (Einstein 1998: 177–198). There are many kinds of creativity—at least as many as the various kinds of intelligence described by Howard Gardner (2004, 2009: 77–102). It is difficult to answer; ‘what is creativity?’ in such short scope. Since there is neither time nor space to answer, I’m going to suggest that anyone who wishes to scratch the surface start with Kaufman and Sternberg (2010) for the big picture, or Gardner (2009: 77–102) for a concise examination.

How does creativity present itself in your discipline? Nobel laureate Herbert Simon defines design concisely. To design is to ‘[devise] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon 1982: 129). This clearly applies to the professions we identify by using the word ‘design’, including graphic design, information design, industrial design, interior design and most of the design fields we cover in Australian universities, along with architecture, landscape, and other such fields. But Simon’s definition of design applies to all fields of professional practice in which a practitioner identifies and solves problems on behalf of a stakeholder or the legitimate owner of the problem. This includes lawyers, physicians, nurses and others. In any field of professional practice where it is our responsibility to solve problems, the nature of creativity is conditioned by at least three requirements. First, creativity arises from the nature of the problem at hand. Creativity requires understanding and addressing the problem. In the words of the late Jens Bernsen (1986), ‘the problem comes first.’ Second, creativity is demonstrated by fitness for purpose. This requires hearing and understanding the needs of those whose problem the designer must solve: stakeholders, clients, end-users, citizens, or others. Third, genuine creativity involves the often difficult balance between immediacy and durability, between expedience and elegance, between constraint and possibility. This last series of challenges is daunting, and it describes the difference between journeyman work and mastery.

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Constrained by time and an essay far longer than the brief notes I already planned, I will stop here. My purpose in this essay was to examine several issues that have not been addressed as widely as they should be. I hope to bring additional thoughts forward as this project evolves.

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Acknowledgements AThis book would not have been possible without the support of the ALTC and its endorsement of the project Assessing Creativity: Strategies and Tools to Support Teaching and Learning in Architecture and Design. The authors would like to thank the 40 design academics who have contributed to this book, in particular Professor Ken Friedman. We also gratefully acknowledge the efforts of Dr Louise Elizabeth Askew and Kathleen Phelps who have supported the preparation of this document, and the project team members, Professor Shane Murray, Associate Professor Andrea Mina, Associate Professor Mark Taylor, Dr Richard Tucker and Louise Wallis.

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Note Elements of the analysis provided in Part One (Reviewing the Theories: An Introduction to Creativity and Reviewing the Responses: Structuring the Matrices) have previously been published by the authors. Chapter One draws on papers published in the conference proceedings from the First International Conference on Design Creativity—ICDC 2010 held in Kobe, Japan, in November/December 2010 (Askland, Williams & Ostwald 2010b) and the DRS2010: Design & Complexity conference held in Montreal, Canada, in July 2010 (Williams, Ostwald & Askland 2010a). The last section of the chapter, which considers approaches to creativity in design, is derived from a paper given at the DESIRE’10: Creativity and Innovation in Design conference held in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 2010 (Askland, Ostwald & Williams 2010c). Sections of the analysis of the symposium responses reviewed in Chapter Two have previously been presented at the ANZAScA 2010 held in Auckland, New Zealand, in November 2010 (Askland, Williams and Ostwald 2010d) and in a paper for Design Principles and Practices Fifth International Conference in Rome in February 2011 (Williams, Ostwald and Askland 2011).

ALTC project related publications The details of these conference proceedings and other publications associated with the larger ALTC project of which this book forms part are: Askland HH, Ostwald MJ, Williams AP. 2010b. From ambiguity to complexity: conceptualising creativity in the context of formal design education. Conference Proceedings: The First International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC2010). The Design Creativity Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Design Society, Kobe, Japan Askland HH, Ostwald MJ, Williams AP. 2010c. Changing conceptualisations of creativity in design. Proceedings of the DESIRE’10 Conference: Creativity and Innovation in Design. Desire Network, Aarhus, Denmark, 4–11 Askland HH, Ostwald MJ, Williams AP. 2010d. Creativity and design: an educational dilemma. Conference Proceedings: ANZAScA 2010: the 44th Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Architectural Science Association. ANZAScA, Auckland, New Zealand

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Gu N, Askland HH, Williams AP. 2010. Virtuality – Offering opportunities for creativity? Conference Proceedings: The First International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC2010). The Design Creativity Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Design Society, Kobe, Japan Williams AP, Ostwald MJ, Askland HH. 2010a. Assessing creativity in the context of architectural design education. Conference Proceedings: DRS 2010 Design and Complexity. Design Research Society, Montreal, Canada Williams AP, Ostwald MJ, Askland HH. 2010b. The design studio, models of creativity and the education of future designers. Proceedings of the DESIRE’10 Conference: Creativity and Innovation in Design, Aarhus, Denmark, 131–7 Williams AP, Ostwald MJ, Askland HH. 2011. Debating, defining and understanding creativity in the design process: implications for education. Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal (under review)

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About the Authors Anthony Williams Associate Professor Anthony Williams is the Head of the School of Architecture and Built Environment at The University of Newcastle, Australia. He is a winner of multiple University Teaching Awards, as well as a National Award for Teaching Excellence. Tony has worked extensively in curriculum design and implementation, both at program and course levels, and has worked as a curriculum consultant both nationally and internationally. He is widely published in the field of Design and Engineering Education, with over 100 publications in these particular professional fields. Tony has been awarded over AU$1million in competitive research funding.

Michael J Ostwald Professor Michael Ostwald is Dean of Architecture at The University of Newcastle. He is a past President of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia (AASA) and a current ARC Future Fellow. He has a PhD in architectural theory and a higher doctorate (DSc) in design mathematics. Michael has more than 300 scholarly publications including 26 books. He has been a Chief Investigator on grants awarded more than AU$4.5 million in competitive research funding, including four current ARC funded projects.

Hedda Haugen Askland Dr Hedda Haugen Askland is the Project Manager of the ALTC project Assessing Creativity: Strategies and Tools to Support Teaching and Learning in Architecture and Design. Hedda has a Candidata Magisterii (Can.Mag.) degree from the University of Bergen, Norway, majoring in social anthropology, a Masters of Social Science and a PhD (Sociology/ Anthropology) from The University of Newcastle, Australia. She is a past recipient of the highly competitive L. Meltzers Høyskolefond (2001, 2002) and the Commonwealth Government funded International Research Scholarship, and in 2007 she won The University of Newcastle School of Humanities and Social Science Publication Prize. For her PhD, Hedda conducted an ethnographic study of East Timorese living in Australia, specifically focusing on how political unrest and national crisis affect exiles’ experiences of self, community and nation.

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