This comment focuses on the role of creativity in design as an academic
discipline. The Proposal for a School of Design at UCI is used for
discussion and to propose some suggestions.

The word "creativity" appears in five occasions throughout the entire
182-page Proposal for a School of Design. One occurs in the Executive
Summary, one as a course in the Sample Curriculum and another in an entry
on Design Dissertations. That leaves two mentions within the main content
of the proposal. The single entry in the exemplary dissertations suggests
that this omission should not be attributed to the authors. It is instead
an illustration of the lack of overlap between design research and studies
of creativity in general. In comparison, the word "virtual" appears in the
proposal eighteen times in total, five of them in exemplary dissertations.
This is an indicator of a paradoxical lack of systematic studies of
creativity within design research. Even in psychology the study of
creativity is considered one of the field's orphans since only around 0.5%
of the articles concern creativity (Sternberg 1999). The paradox is, of
course, that whilst most designers would agree that achieving creativity is
fundamental, systematic studies of what this may actually mean remain rare.

A complete search for dissertations that contain the terms 'design' and
'creativity' further illustrates this idea. The ProQuest Dissertation
Abstracts database contains more than two million entries with some 47,000
added each year. 24,563 contain the word 'design' in their title. 1,764
contain the word 'creativity' in their title. Only 29 contain both words in
their title. A total of 126 dissertations contain the word 'design' in
their title and 'creativity' as a keyword. Compare this to the study of
other human phenomena like perception (9,372 entries), language (16,351)
and memory (7,715). Even the word 'death' with 3,590 entries appears in
dissertation titles twice as often as creativity and also more often than
'innovation' with 2,414 citations.

If the objective of design in the university is to advance our
understanding of the theory and practice of design, it is my opinion that a
stronger emphasis should be made on the link between design and creativity
in the University.

Creativity in the University can be approached in two ways, i.e., in regard
to the academic enterprise of knowledge building and in regard to the
curriculum. Both aspects are closely related since one would expect that
generating scientific knowledge about a subject would enable its teaching.
Two mentions of creativity in the proposal (pages 2 and 8) indeed refer to
"the traditional apprenticeship and practice-based" training of designers
where creativity and originality are tied to "processes of trial and error
characteristic of the arts and craft tradition". This deserves a careful
analysis. To some extent, some people in the field may still believe that
creativity is an innate talent that some have and others don't. Something
like the ability to run fast or dance well. However, these notions of
innate giftedness and particularly in the case of creativity, have been
challenged by many scholars over the last decades. Michael Howe
consistently showed that the belief that innate gifts are a precondition
for high achievement is misleading. The evidence simply does not support
the talent account:

"A body of findings hard to reconcile with the talent account comes from
experiments on ordinary adults who are given large amounts of training at
skills that make heavy demands on memory. In some instances, the trained
subjects achieved performance levels far higher than what most people had
believed possible. Uninformed observers assumed that the participants must
have had a special innate aptitude" (Howe et al 1999)

Such attribution typically made when confronted with seemingly
extraordinary behaviour may explain the creativity-as-innate-giftedness
account with the implied belief that creativity cannot be learnt.
Proponents of such view seem to suggest that placing student and
practitioner in the studio will have osmotic effects by which the student
will learn what creativity is and how to be creative. The problem is, as
suggested in the proposal, that most of the time trial-and-error is far
less effective than systematic study. Otherwise academic disciplines would
have no raison d'etre.

The first suggestion for any new School of Design is therefore that
creativity be included in the 'non-traditional side' of teaching, to use
the own proposal's vocabulary. Research universities offering 'a liberal
undergraduate education' would be mistaken if they perpetuate an uninformed
view of creativity into the next century. Here the issue is not merely to
advocate multidisciplinarity and an integrative (i.e., tolerant) approach
to arts and sciences. The point is that creativity should be taken
seriously, as something that humans do and is therefore subject to
scrutiny, analysis, and development. At this stage no-one expects the
discovery of a single unique 'creative ability' or a fixed set of cognitive
functions that will unravel the secrets of creativity. Instead there is an
emerging consensus that our understanding will be advanced by integrating
the puzzle from different disciplines that address individual and social
aspects of human behaviour.

The accompanying suggestion is, of course, that creativity be included in
the research programs of Schools of Design. The current ratio of 0.005
design dissertations with the keyword 'creativity' should increase
significantly if a body of knowledge is to be built as a foundation for
creative design as an academic discipline.

Moreover, references to creative behaviour and solutions are common outside
the arts. The best scientists, engineers, and managers acknowledge the role
of creativity in their fields. Until recently, unconscious lapses of
inspiration were seen as the causes of creativity. Today the emphasis is in
the complex interaction of individual, social, and environmental factors
(Weihua 2003, Perry-Smith 2002).

As we progress in understanding creativity, so does our ability to teach
our students how to apply their capacities to achieve solutions considered
creative by their peers and target users. There is no need to panic about
the systematic study of creativity. The best practitioners still need
support from scientific knowledge. As for the students, professional
education has to address abilities that would otherwise be limited to
apprenticeship.






References

- Howe, MJA, Davidson, JW, and Sloboda, JA: 1999, Innate traits: reality or
myth?, in SJ Ceci and WM Williams: The Nature-Nurture Debate, The Essential
Readings, Blackwell, Malden, pp. 258-289.
- Perry-Smith, JE: 2002,        The social side of creativity: An
examination of a social network perspective, PhD thesis, Georgia Institute
of Technology.
- Sternberg, RJ (ed): 1999, Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
- Weihua, N: 2003, Individual and environmental influences on Chinese
student creativity, PhD thesis, Yale University.






-- Ricardo Sosa
SID: 200036769
PhD candidate, 4th year
Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition
Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney
http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~rsos7705