Perceptions of creativity amongst university design tutors

This paper describes the perceptions and views of creativity amongst a selection of UK-based design tutors. The paper 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 specialises in design education. The researchers adopted a semi-structured interview approach and collected a series of rich insights into how design tutors conceptualise creativity, and how they perceive their role in developing creativity in their students. The findings show perhaps unsurprisingly that design tutors clearly value creativity whilst, at the same time, they find it very difficult to define and conceptualise. They were also unable to articulate how they helped their students develop their own creativity. The findings also reveal that the design tutors would value understanding creativity more in order to improve their teaching.