Role of Form-making Exercises in Design Education for Creative Thinking

Abstract

Recently people consider design as a problem solving process. Therefore, todays design approaches and processes are focused mainly in finding out the problems in our daily lives, proposing the necessary design concepts and making the objects to solve those problems. However, looking back how living culture has been shaped around our daily objects, it is far from the design process as we usually think of as mentioned above. At the beginning of human civilization, primitive men found objects around them which fit their purposes and utilized them as tools. That is, people designed the tools by taking advantages of properties of diverse objects around them. These days, however, by taking design as a problem solver, designers try to create a novel form that follows functions assigned by them. Thus there are relatively insufficient studies and practices regarding form-making exercises to build ideas upon naturally shaped forms. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore practicability of form-making exercises in design education and professional fields, and suggest a design ideation toolkit to develop further design concepts. We conveyed four workshops with primary and secondary school design and art teachers in order to see how form-making exercises along with the design ideation toolkit can be applied in art classes, as well as a workshop with elementary school students in fifth grade. Throughout the five workshops, we referenced cognitive psychology theory of affordances, to explain actions inherent on natural objects and environments. At the workshops, we tested the design ideation toolkit which take use of 1) Different Viewpoints and Scales, 2) Properties and Functions, to imagine various affordances of forms. By making patterns out of creative thinking processes and outputs of participants from the five workshop sessions, we will discuss how these combinations of form-making exercises followed by the design ideation toolkit have educational effects in schools to develop students creativities. Furthermore, we will find possibilities of design education methods that apply abstract forms of objects into solid design concepts which could be used in the professional fields.