Examining aspects of self in the creative design process: towards pedagogic implications

Abstract

I am a practising jewellery designer and artist who lectures at a university of technology in South Africa. The aim of this study was to deepen my understanding of my own creative design process so that I can better facilitate my students' creative development. I used the little-c (everyday creativity) definition of creativity as a framework for analysing work that I exhibited in a self-study research exhibition. By analysing the space in which I worked and the objects I produced, I looked to see how aspects of self manifested within the process of producing creative artefacts. This was a qualitative study in a transformative paradigm, using autoethnography as methodology. The analysis was done by conducting an autoethnographic interview with myself, and then analysing the responses. To ensure trustworthiness, I show several images of my creative work in situ. I also use a convention of nested text boxes to show the relationship between my reflections and meta-reflections. The study produced several key realisations that could leverage pedagogical implications: the creative process is not linear, serendipity can be harnessed, play should be encouraged, and personal experience can be incorporated in the creative design process. Autoethnographic research into my own creative design process made visible the richness of personal histories and local contexts as resources for learning and teaching about creativity and, more broadly, as resources for social change.