Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design

Learning to think and act creatively is a requisite fundamental aspect of design education for architectural and interior design as well as industrial and graphic design. Development of creative capacities must be encountered early in design education for beginning students to become self-actualized as skillful designers.

With chapters written by beginning design instructors, Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design addresses issues that contribute to deficiencies in teaching creativity in contemporary beginning design programs. Where traditional pedagogies displace creative thinking by placing conceptual abstractions above direct experiential engagement, the approaches presented in this book set forth alternative pedagogies that mitigate student fears and misconceptions to reveal the potency of authentic encounters for initiating creative transformational development.

These chapters challenge design pedagogy to address such issues as the spatial body, phenomenological thinking, making as process, direct material engagement and its temporal challenges, creative decision making and the wickedness of design, and the openness of the creative design problem. In doing so, this book sets out to give greater depth to first design experiences and more effectively enable the breadth and depth of the teacher–student relationship as a means of helping your students develop the capacity for long-term self-transformation.

Stephen Temple teaches beginning design and theory at the University of Texas at San Antonio, USA. He studies philosophy and psychology as a precursor to creative thinking and builds to explore theory. His recent book, Making Thinking: Beginning Architectural Design Education (2011) supports making as a foundation experience for design education.