Abstract
The importance of cultivating a creative mindset in fashion design students to eventually thrive in the rapidly changing work environment that demands novelty in design is becoming increasingly relevant from an educational perspective. In addition, the challenges to enhance creative design processes of students have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which caused a sudden transformation from traditional contact education, to online and later blended learning. This implies that educators are challenged to re-think traditional strategies of teaching creativity to align to the shifting conditions. This paper addresses a possible means to re-conceptualise a creativity framework that has been developed and implemented in a previous study for collaborative face-to-face learning environments, to align with the new learning situation. A framework from this study highlights, firstly, that it is important for students to apply creative problem solving with cognitive fluency, flexibility, and flow, particularly in constantly changing environments where it is necessary for a designer to be agile. Secondly, the role of positive emotions is imperative in students’ creative design processes, as experiencing these emotions can ignite an open mind that may enhance the ability to think creatively to produce novelty. It is therefore important that students' positive emotions are supported during independent creative design processes. The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual teaching framework that presents principles to enhance students’ positive emotions and novelty during design processes in a blended learning context with a strong online component. A conceptual approach was taken to construct the proposed framework. The inquiry followed reasoned argumentation to synthesise a) the four pedagogical areas of Cronje’s (2021) suggested integrated blended learning matrix for decision-making learning contexts, namely: Known knowledge, Complex knowledge, as well as the domains of Knowable and Chaos with, b) literature, including previously published papers by the researcher/author of this paper, and c) the researcher’s interpretations of how these can be applied to derive a logical framework for the purpose of this paper. The discussion of the synthesis for the proposed framework links Cronje’s (2021) model logically to positive emotion theory in terms of interest, pleasure, pride, and satisfaction, and then relates these to aspects of the fashion design process. This synthesis of information is then consolidated into a diagrammatical framework to illustrate how the concepts in the structure relate. The conceptual framework of this paper provides a valuable starting point but needs further investigation and implementation to assess the efficiency of the structure for students’ independent creative design processes.