Fostering Creativity in Design Education: Using the Creative Product Analysis Matrix with Chinese Undergraduates in Macau

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to explore to what extent the use of a more structured mode of assessing creative products – specifically, the CPAM – could beneficially influence design students’ product creativity and creative processes. For this qualitative inquiry, following our CPAM-based intervention, students wrote’ reflective papers in response to five open-ended questions, and these papers were used as the major source for data analysis. Three major themes were found during the data analysis: (a) creative approaches to generating products; (b) positive and negative experience in the creative and learning process; and (c) the effects of introducing the CPAM model. It is suggested that the CPAM model could be used as a set of criteria with which design educators could objectively assess students’ creative products, as our participants found it easy to understand.