Teaching creativity to design students as future-proofing

Abstract

In place of inevitable social chaos and planetary degradation, meta-design offers a new framework for the future of humanity. Meta-design expands the concept of design, and the designer, and implicates society as a whole in the process of producing a designed future. An essential ingredient in discovering new ways to deal with existing and as yet unknown aspects of our present predicament is creativity. This paper considers how design students may be encouraged to develop their creativity through appropriate training and to widen individual understanding not only of what they are personally capable of achieving but also of their position in society. How the brain creates new patterns of thinking through ideational code switching and contextual focus is considered in relation to appropriate methods of engendering creative conceptualisation. It concludes by briefly sketching how design education might respond in terms of curriculum development to what is an increasingly urgent predicament of unsustainablity Keywords: Design Education, Creativity, Meta-design