Developing Creative Thinking among Design Students

In today’s information explosion era, the creation and manipulation of knowledge have become more favoured than its memorisation, especially when learning reaches a higher level. It has become more important for design students, who are supposed to perform higher order thinking and possess creative ability, to generate new ideas. However, not all design students can access their creativity on the first day of their design study. How best to nurture creativity among design students thus becomes an important issue. In this paper, the limitations of current creative thinking development are identified through a case study of Hong Kong, and a framework is proposed to address these limitations so that creativity and its thought processes can be nurtured and developed among students. It is hoped that the findings and discussions in the paper will provide direction for teachers and researchers in facilitating creativity and developing students’ creative thinking.