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