Cross-Disciplinary Creativity and Design Thinking

Abstract

Cross-disciplinarity is a converging process of reinstating the human as the core focus of all scientific endeavour and cultural practices, and humanness. Creativity is a renewal of human experience for good life. Design thinking is a skill of the twenty-first century towards generating immediate solution for complex and practical problems. Our chapter presents three assumptions of cross-disciplinary creativity for nurturing design thinking. One assumption is related to mechanisms of creativity: convergence, divergence, and emergence, which embrace the assumption of humanistic values of design thinking: harmony, authoritative conversation, and respect. Another assumption concerns principles of creativity experiences: interaction, continuity, and complementarity. In experiencing learning the principle of interaction unites (converges) with the principle of continuity. The principle of complementarity embraces the unified interaction and continuity in experience for creative synthesis (convergence in divergence) or emergence. Design thinking searches for emergence of novelty within the designer(s) or within the community of designer(s) in the presence of harmonious and respectful conversations. Value-oriented boundary crossing creativity nurtures design thinking for ethical solutions for complex problems. To elaborate, we present our experiences with the community of practice in an action research project on cross-disciplinary creative design teaching. We conclude by presenting an account on Singapore's narratives of its creative design development and transformation.