Including diversity in creative teamwork in design education

Abstract

This article explores how to teach the inclusion of diversity in creative teamwork. Diversity is an important aspect of design education, since professional design work increasingly takes place in diverse teams. Practical approaches and theory from the fields of creativity, creative problem solving, and innovation inform the teaching approaches in a design methods course conducted in Kumasi, Ghana in 2012.Here, teams of Danish design students and Ghanaian art students collaborated for four weeks to identify and solve problems in relation to waste and the environment. This article identifies and presents three categories of approaches, which were used to include diversity in the course: “Building Relationships,” “Mapping Diversity,” and “Creating a Shared Process Language.” Findings indicate that including diversity involves a combination of laying a solid foundation at the outset of the project and helping students actively recognize and use diversity throughout the project. In the present case, the student teams, in general, appeared unable to leverage diversity constructively, and the Danish students perceived themselves to be less creative than they had expected. The article identifies and discusses the possible causes of the lack of constructive use of diversity and provides new recommendations for future projects involving diversity in design education.