Personalised Creativity Development through Design Thinking

Developing creativity in higher education can be challenging because of the differences in students’ personality- and cognitive traits, creative competence and learning preferences. This pilot study presents a novel prototype of a pedagogical model that integrates principles of design thinking and personalised learning to cultivate creative confidence within a pedagogical setting in higher education. The model is based on a multi-level theoretical framework comprising pedagogy of creativity from micro- and macro level consisting of literature on creativity, creative confidence, how creativity can be practiced, creative diversity, personalised learning as well as design thinking and its educational applications. A quasi-experiment of the pedagogical intervention explores how the students experienced and perceived the outcomes of each step of the design thinking process when applied to their personal creative development. It also investigates what ways the empirical data collected from the intervention align with the core constructs of the proposed model for personalised creativity development. The data is analysed through directed content analysis. The results suggest that design thinking offers a structured approach for supporting cognitive processes of creativity as well as interaction with the surrounding system to increase creative confidence. The main contribution of the experiment is the new hypotheses for further research around the topical issues of design thinking’s pedagogical applications and personalised creativity development.