2026-09-22T13:32:29Zhttps://dora.dmu.ac.uk/server/oai/requestoai:dora.dmu.ac.uk:2086/209762021-06-09T02:08:49Zcom_2086_2388col_2086_2389
An explorative study of creativity: assessment of design outcomes
Iacob, Alis
This research study presents an investigation of creativity assessment in design
education. Prompted by an anecdotal observation on how creativity is approached in
design academia, this research showed that both from a practical and theoretical
point of view, creativity is yet to be fully understood. 50 years of research in the field
seemed to have lead to more questions than answers as despite a theoretically rich
body of knowledge, it is yet to be determined what is creativity and how could this be
assessed. While gaining momentum since 2009, creativity as an investigatory area is
only now on the global agenda, as experts urge that sectors such as higher
education cannot afford any longer to only vaguely understand the assessment of
creativity. The gaps in the literature which ranged from not having a clear, universally
agreed upon assessment approach, to not knowing who should assess creativity
exposed an opportunity for contribution to creativity research in general and creativity
in design academia, in particular.
Set as an experimental study, this project made an attempt to propose a contribution to
design academia by conducting a controlled exploration of creativity and its
assessment. The experimental study put forward a theoretically pinned method of
investigation: the Creativity Genoplore (CG) which implied a two stage study: the
generation of a design product (geno) followed by its assessment exploration
(plore). Upon the development of a simple task referred to as Creativity Board
(CBoard), 68 design students produced design outcomes which were consequently
assessed by 47 design academics. Upon the analysis of the results, it was found that
while from a theoretical point of view, a universal understanding of creativity does not
exist, within the remits of this experiment the academics agreed with each other on
what makes a design outcome creative. The 0.831, inter-rater agreement (Cronbach
Alpha coefficient), which according to the literature placed the agreement on the
good to fairly high bracket, implied that design academics know how to assess
creativity and could pinpoint and deconstruct creativity. This was supported both by
the agreement between the academics and the common keywords they have used to
describe the creativity of a design product. As such, a clarification of creativity as a
marking criteria on assessment sheets was possible, which in turn intended to
prompt a further discussion on how is creativity assessed in general and design
academia in particular.
The results of the study also found that there might be value in centring further
investigations on what does not constitute a design creative and on extracting the
definitions of the keywords design academics used to justify their assessment.
De Montfort University
2019-12
Thesis or dissertation
Doctoral
PhD
en
https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/20976
https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/e0de7f72-4f67-47e0-8d36-6b218c1d3ac7/download
3a777b53710f71f5c1797e1672c86069
https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/6424e6a3-751f-4bac-98ed-51b192dabaaa/download
bd41181d9a4c38b5ebacc69a027024d9
Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities