Grounding the Teaching of Design in Creativity

Creativity is an important ingredient in news design. It's what judges look for when awarding prizes, what employers seek in new hires, and what designers struggle to find within themselves when confronted with design challenges. Innumerable seminars, conferences, articles, and books have been devoted to the subject, yet creativity -- disciplined, focused creativity - remains elusive and is lamented as being in short supply. Perhaps now more than ever, it is vital for new journalism design graduates to develop the skills that will allow them to tap into their own creativity. The proliferation of news Web sites provides one mandate: the differences in format and psychological processing of these sites requires designers to think creatively to solve design dilemmas that are still being discovered, and to do it with tremendous limitations imposed by browsers, monitor sizes, and other constraints unique to cyberspace. For print designers, increased competition - both from traditional and new media - means higher stakes for magazines and newspapers, and increasingly, design is looked to as a means of gaining the competitive edge. Knowing how to foster creativity in themselves and others will be a vital skill for future visual journalists. Many psychologists believe creative thinking is something that can be taught. In this study, we incorporated the teaching of creativity into a class in magazine design and tested the effectiveness of the creativity-enhanced curriculum with an experiment using pre- and post-tests on treatment and control groups. A case for creativity Creativity is a recurring theme in design literature (Utt & Pasternack, 1993; Miller, 1992; Shepard, 1996). The Society of News Design' (SND) once devoted an entire issue of its journal (Design, May 1988) to the subject, and one of SND's first conferences focused on creativity. Nearly every issue of the journal and every conference since has included some mention of this seemingly mysterious process and its products. Most often, design industry articles and seminars feature anecdotal evidence of work deemed to be creative. The tacit understanding is that designers will borrow the ideas offered, applying them to their own situations (Watson, 1992; Cutsinger, 1988). While some designers will find ways to adapt these design ideas to their own problems, most will simply file them in a drawer and never have the opportunity to recreate them, thanks to the principle that editorial designers live by - that of content-driven design. Content-driven design says that a page's design is determined by the story's content, thus, different stories require different designs. A given design cannot be applied like a boilerplate to just any other situation. Thus, the value of these anecdotal approaches to creativity is limited. These same articles and seminars that present examples of creative work seldom teach designers about the kind of thinking that results in creativity despite the vast knowledge that psychological research has contributed to our understanding of creativity. The same is true of the way design is taught in the college classroom; despite our increasing understanding of how creativity works, such information is rarely imparted to students who are nevertheless encouraged to "be creative" without ever being told how.2 In Grows (1992) article on teaching higher-order skills, many of the components of what he calls self-directed learning are the same as the components of creativity - original thinking, openness to new ideas, ability to tolerate uncertainty and adapt to change, selfesteem, self-motivation, persistence, and enjoying something for its own sake, for example. Journalism educators rarely discuss such skills or how to teach them, he says (p. 57). The same is true for creativity skills - even classes with "creative" in the name (creative writing, for example) rarely teach specific creativity skills. And in the large body of literature on creativity, only a few articles even mention mass media (Turow, 1982). …