Managing Virtual Changes-A Guide to Creative Problem Solving for the Design Professions

Design professionals collectively address a broad range of environmental problems that touch society.  They address social needs, city forms, environmental impacts, site planning, product design, and the aesthetics of architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, industrial design etc.  While beginnings are often tentative and intuitive, the developmental stages over time lead to improvement and redirection.

In recent years, we have seen a change; designers and educators alike have been seeking a more meaningful basis for design and to improve the quality of design by responding to the rapidly changing nature of the design tasks.  The desire to make design a more viable and a less arbitrary force in preservation and the development of the environment helped to create stronger design methodology.  Design professions strive to view the totality of problems and develop unique and creative solutions as they impact society.  The integration of the holistic approach to design, when inserted into the higher education curricula, can help focus the education and training of every future designer.

            Traditionally, design problems presented to students, in many programs, include complete or partial problem statements that delegate little authority to the students to discover the real problem.  They infrequently promote thinking that calls for initiative and creative exercise from the students.  This approach tends to frustrate students and brings criticism from practitioners in the field who point to the failure of design education.  Much attention in the design fields emphasizes teaching precision in thinking or critical thinking.  In the process, the learner tends to repress an equally important attitude of thought: the approximate.  The attitude of approximate thinking becomes unacceptable and wrong.  Educators are asking their students to be precise at a time when it is not necessary or appropriate.  Precision or fine-tuning of the learner’s thinking comes later, after playing with ideas and using the magic of the mind.

            George M. Prince (1975), the author of ''The Practice of Creativity'' and the founder of Synectics, stresses the importance of approximate thinking and says that learning and problem- solving require a tolerance of approximate thinking.  Unfortunately, we tend to repress approximate thoughts because as we learn, experience continually conditions us against it.  This is paradoxical because approximate thinking is essential to learning.

            Narrowly defining a problem too early in the design process limits the student or the practitioner when determining the basicproblem.  Most Creative Problem-Solving techniques stress the need to broaden the problem in order to enrich the understanding of the overall goal by considering the broader definitions of the challenge.  However, there is little indication that design and planning, which is the direct outgrowth of creative behavior and which values uniqueness in its product, is stressed in courses of design.

The relationship of creativity to the educational process had not been intensively studied until the last four decades.  As in the case of native intelligence, the operating assumption was that novel response was primarily an inherited trait.  The last forty years of creativity research refutes this assumption.  Proponents believe that however creativity is defined; it is a form of behavior that can be enhanced through the educational process.

            Design educators are confronting the problem of how they may incorporate creative behavior and thinking in environmental design education and how to further stimulate the practicing professional to reach higher levels of design.  Teachers in environmental design occupy a unique place with respect to the need for increasing the level of creative performance in their students.  They have a responsibility that goes beyond contributing to the development of creative artists.  Design courses stand out as the one area where students not only have some freedom to be creative, but also the requirement.  Design teachers have the chance to model and develop creative thinking habits in their students.  Certain instructional strategies have proved effective in prod