How do we go from everyday creative thinking to ground-breaking?
People were shocked by Singapore’s Pisa toppers in an area we don’t feel confident about. Process-focused “design thinking” can help change this.
Dawn Lim
When Singapore 15-year-olds topped a test on creative thinking conducted in 2022 as part of the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), many at home were stunned.
Despite our success as a nation, we often do not see ourselves as creative people.
Only 64 per cent of Singaporean students feel confident in their creativity, compared to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 73 per cent. Even more striking is that less than half believe they can craft compelling stories or invent new things.
Why is there this gap between perception and reality? Our youth excel in standardised tests on creativity, but feel inadequate to tackle unstructured tasks that require the same skill.
At the heart of this is our lack of confidence, specifically creative confidence – and the answer involves nurturing what is termed a “design mindset”.
Bending rules to break and build
The design mindset is a way of solving problems – understanding users’ needs and exploring a wide range of ideas, even at the risk of failure. It is about falling in love with the problem, not the solution.
Ambiguity and chaos are embraced because situations are not always predictable or controllable. This differs from critical thinking, which prioritises objective evaluation and logical reasoning.
More importantly, design thinking’s framework and codified processes can enable participants to learn creativity and become confident in applying it. In a design thinking workshop, a student from Jurong Pioneer Junior College expressed doubt he could ever be creative. The facilitator introduced techniques to bend the rules, question established norms and break current patterns, such as doing routine tasks differently to gain a new perspective.
The student and his team took the lessons to heart. It paid off when an invention by them clinched second prize in a contest organised by Singapore Airlines (SIA) and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) that aimed to promote awareness about design and upcycling, using parts and material from retired aircraft.
Design thinking lessons do not just end there. A study by researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Education in 2019 revealed that students were able to apply the strategies they had learnt to entirely new problems, without prompting, and that they also performed better on projects.
Right answer mentality
However, in her Straits Times commentary “Are Singaporean students really the most creative thinkers?”, senior education correspondent Sandra Davie rightly highlighted that the Pisa results reflected our students’ everyday creative thinking, rather than the type of creativity that leads to ground-breaking inventions or works of art.
The challenge now is to continuously strengthen the “little c” to boost confidence in our abilities, ultimately spurring us towards the “Big C” – moments of scientific, technological, social, or artistic breakthroughs.
Cue, design mindset, involving creative confidence – a term popularised by a book of the same phrase by the founders of a United States design consulting firm, Mr David and Tom Kelley. It is the belief that one can generate, and act on, new ideas to make meaningful changes. Factors such as drive, willingness to take risks and societal influences play a role in developing this can-do attitude and the courage to embrace risk and uncertainty.
When I first attended class in the US as an undergraduate, I experienced culture shock at the intensity of debate and engagement on campus. As a Singaporean student accustomed to seek the “right answer”, I initially tended to self-edit, not daring to express riskier answers for fear of getting them wrong or being judged by my classmates or lecturers. Over time, by sheer necessity to pass my classes, I learnt to be more comfortable in engaging openly with contrasting opinions and different perspectives. There was no single “right answer”. The process was valued as much as the outcome, fostering a different kind of learning – one that nurtures creative confidence over time.
Singapore’s education system has since evolved. We’ve revamped our curriculum to focus on learning rather than grades, abolishing examinations in lower primary levels.
Learning experiences such as the Interdisciplinary Project Work programme that the Ministry of Education (MOE) encourages in primary and secondary schools give students the chance to apply their knowledge across different subjects to real-world situations where the answer is not always clear. A simple example is applying maths and science in cooking through researching, experimenting with and measuring basic ingredients to create a dish. These changes have certainly borne fruit over the years, as seen in the Pisa results.
Yet a lingering concern remains – have we truly shaken off the “right answer” mindset to grow creative confidence in our young?
The link between design and creativity
The book Creative Confidence highlights that creative geniuses, from musicians like Mozart to scientists such as Charles Darwin, were no strangers to failure – they just didn’t let it hold them back. Such “Big C” personalities understood that failing early could lead to innovation and success.
Indeed, a 2010 paper by Swedish, Dutch and German researchers found that creative confidence can be unlocked through design thinking – which involves that fearlessness to fail.
The study showed that when students faced creative challenges, quickly tested their ideas, refined them, then experienced tangible success, they gained significant confidence.
The relevance for Singapore is that honing everyday creative thinking – “little c” – to be willing to think out of the box and unafraid of constant tinkering can lead to ground-breaking innovations. Take the humble Post-it note. It originated from a 3M scientist’s attempts to create adhesives for use in aircraft construction. When those adhesives turned out weak and easy to remove, his colleague saw the potential to use them as removable bookmarks for his hymn book. The rest is history.
Mr Brian Chesky, a start-up co-founder once said: “With creativity you can always find a way.” He elaborated that it is a powerful realisation when you understand that everything man-made was designed – because “when you know that, you know you can change that”. Trained as an industrial designer, Mr Chesky and his co-founders famously faced more than 15 rejections before successfully disrupting the travel industry with their start-up called Airbnb.
Similarly, those who exercise their “little c” can spark movements or become creative leaders. Twenty-nine-year-old Singaporean Oh Chu Xian founded her start-up, Magorium, five years ago to turn plastic waste into a new bitumen-like material for road construction.
But her interest was sparked earlier, while researching greener alternative materials for infrastructure for her family business. She has been hailed for her efforts, and is supported by organisations such as Temasek Foundation and the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment. In an interview for the DesignSingapore Council’s People of Design campaign, Ms Oh said she has to be creative every day because creativity is essential to everyday problem-solving.
Accessing creativity, growing confidence
At the biennial Design Education Summit in November 2023, the Minister for Education, Mr Chan Chun Sing, outlined the crux of design thinking:
1. Every age can. 2. Everyone can. 3. Every idea counts.
This simple, yet powerful, mindset is key to creative confidence. The MOE has been an advocate for design thinking, encouraging schools to integrate it through the Applied Learning and Values in Action (VIA) programmes.
At Dunman Secondary, students used design in VIA projects where they developed and tested prototypes to detect and remove algae in hydroponic vegetable cultivation. Ai Tong School introduces Primary 4 pupils to design thinking through its Innovator Programme, teaching them that problem-solving is flexible, with diverse approaches to discovering what works best.
This is a promising step forward. It complements design “doing” through a more hands-on curriculum like Design & Technology (D&T). Still, we can do more.
A recent report from Singapore’s Design Education Advisory Committee (DEAC) recommends making design a core element in learning, with a structured and deeper approach in schools. This will not only strengthen innovation and boost creative confidence, it also equips the next generation with a life skill that will drive Singapore’s success.
Among its proposals is introducing design in the curriculum from primary to secondary education, like skills such as numeracy; it also proposes developing platforms for students across different levels to learn from design practitioners. At a higher education level, it calls for restructuring local design education to broaden it beyond the traditional fields of arts and media to encompass a wide array of industries and disciplines.
This approach may seem unconventional, but look around Singapore today. Our success boils down to our uniqueness and willingness to innovate. Our pioneers embodied creative confidence; they made the most of limited resources, forging a path forward even when they did not know how it would turn out. It is about making progress rather than getting it perfect.
Our next generation must possess the same confidence and creativity. They already have the potential. It is up to us to nurture their belief in themselves.
- Dawn Lim is executive director of the DesignSingapore Council.
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