A study of university design tutors' perceptions of creativity

This paper describes the perceptions and views of creativity among a selection of the UK-based design tutors. The study presents the findings of research that has questioned a total of 16 design tutors in architecture and industrial design in a leading UK university that specializes in design education. The researchers adopted a semi-structured interview approach and collected a series of rich insights into how design tutors conceptualize creativity and how they perceive their role in developing creativity in their students. The findings show that design tutors clearly value creativity, but, at the same time, they find it very difficult to define and conceptualize. The results also show that the tutors were unable to articulate how they helped their students develop their own creativity. Moreover, the results reveal that the design tutors would value understanding creativity more in order to improve their teaching.