From Creative Thinking Techniques To Innovative Design Solutions – The Educators’ Perspective

For every designer, it is crucial to be creative. But generating new, innovative ideas tends to be a difficult task. Nevertheless, some technique can be used to improve the quality of the designing process. Getting knowledge about such tools can be of much value for all future architects and engineers. This article presents an original academic course, which was inaugurated in 2015 at the Faculty of Architecture in Gdańsk University of Technology and organized for the first year students of Spatial Planning. The course was repeated in 2016 and is being currently led in 2017. The title of the course was ‘Garden Cities and the Gardens in the Cities. A Course with Elements of Training Creativity’. The aim of the course was to encourage the participants to develop their creativity by introducing creative thinking techniques and thus to facilitate their projects. Among the recommended creative thinking techniques were mainly the ones presented in the ‘Odyssey of the Mind’ educational program, including such techniques as the ‘Mind Map,’ the ‘Brainstorm’ and the ‘Superheroes.’ Moreover, during the study, participants had a chance to improve their team working skills. The practical usage of the introduced innovative methods was to be tested on issues concerning green environmental projects in urban areas. At the end of the course, most of the participants declared, in the final students’ questionnaires, to use the recommended techniques in future, and that they strongly appreciated all that they had learned during the study.