Assessing creativity in the context of architectural design education

In a study on architectural education in Australasia, Ostwald and Williams (2008a; 2008b) found that one of the most contentious issues facing architecture and design education is the assessment of creativity. The problem is not new, yet, despite ongoing criticism of the frameworks used to assess creativity in architecture and design, the assessment of students‟ creative work remains a vexed issue. Central to the problem of assessment is the lack of an unambiguous disciplinary definition of creativity. The concept of creativity has been understood in different and often conflicting ways, and across the design disciplines there is no shared understanding about creative processes and, in particular, how they apply to learning and teaching experiences. The paper briefly outlines the main problems related to assessing creativity before exploring the complexity embodied in the notion of “creativity” as it relates to design education. The research presented in this paper is derived from an extensive and critically framed literature review and forms part of an ongoing research project concerning the question of creativity within design education.