Activity theory as a systems approach to design creativity and research

AECT 2020 Virtual International Convention, November 2-7, 2020

Summary

The systems oriented analytical framework of activity theory was used to explore student development within a project-based course in order to gain a firmer understanding of the contextual factors shaping students’ creative design ability. Learner autonomy, prototyping, psychological safety, tolerance of ambiguity, and community were found to be major contextual factors that shaped students’ creative design ability. Methods, findings, and implications will be shared, and attendees will learn how to broadly define activity systems. AECT 2020 Virtual International Convention - Towards Culturally-Situated Learning Design and Research.

Proposal

This study investigated how creative design ability developed for an interdisciplinary group of undergraduate students as they identified, designed, and delivered final projects to solve everyday problems. The research effort sought to better understand what contextual elements shaped students’ creative design ability and to find evidence of creativity and design thinking in students’ developmental process. Outputs of the study were (a) theoretical model for growing a community of creative designers and (b) guidelines for revision and implementation of similar course designs. The data suggested that the development of creative design ability is strongly influenced by prototyping within a supportive community and when students are given high degrees of autonomy in their coursework. High degrees of autonomy in project work appeared to support students’ intrinsic motivation, which appeared to support students as they navigated the uncertainty and contradictions associated with the creative design process. Activity theory, as an analytical framework for conducting research, emphasized the connections between learners, practical activity, and community.

Several methods were used to gather the data for this study, and an exploratory mixed-methods design (Creswell, 2009) was selected. The mixed-methods design afforded a blend of survey, design journal, and interview data within an analytical framework specified by activity theory (Engeström, 2014; Jonassen, 2002) and was informed by the theoretical perspective of social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978) and constructionism (Papert & Harel, 1991). Data was collected via (a) a longitudinal series of student design journals, (b) student interviews, and (c) a design thinking traits survey. Data analysis and interpretation were guided by the analytical framework of activity theory (Engeström, 2014; Jonassen, 2002), thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Mann, 2016), and descriptive statistics (Huck, 2008; Spatz, 2008). Findings were organized and reported using activity theory (Engeström, 2014).

This study found the major contextual factors surrounding students’ creative design process to be motivation, tool use, prototyping, community, and creative confidence. Additionally, the ambiguity of the design process was a mediating factor for most students. Given that the data emphasized the importance of community for shaping the development of students’ creative design ability, a model was developed to serve as a guide for the design and implementation of project-based courses when creative design ability is the desired outcome.

Learner autonomy facilitated participants’ motivation and engagement with personally meaningful design choices.

This study blended the creativity and design literature with the systems framework of activity theory to gain a firmer understanding of how creative design ability develops for novice designers in a higher education setting. It appears that high levels of learner autonomy, project-work within a supportive community, and extended time for practice led to outcomes of creative agency and the use of the course community as a collective design tool. A cluster of five interrelated factors, their dimensions, and their changes throughout the course stood out as the main contextual factors that shaped participants’ creative design ability. These factors were (a) tool exploration, (b) prototyping, (c) community, (d) motivation, and (e) creative agency. The course’s community emerged as a collective hub for activity that was shaped and amplified by the other factors. Importantly, the course instructor modeled an overall tone of psychological safety (Baer & Frese, 2003; Edmondson et al., 2016; Newman et al., 2017; Rogers, 1954) supportive of creative expression and provided practical guidance for the use of creative design methods. Learner autonomy facilitated participants’ motivation and engagement with personally meaningful design choices. This dynamic and entangled cluster of factors were the most frequently mentioned actions and affect throughout the journal and interview data, which suggests them as factors that can accurately model the course as an activity system.

A reason why these five factors received the highest amount of coded references is that they frequently overlapped with each other. In other words, the most referenced codes were also the most interconnected. It is difficult to talk about one factor without mentioning the others, and therefore they are discussed from a systems perspective.

A higher-level perspective across the course activity system reveals three general categories that organize the five factors that emerged from this study. The three categories were (a) actions (e.g., behavior, cognition), (b) affect (e.g., emotions), and (c) social (e.g., environmental.) Actions included cognitive behaviors that were not directly observable, such as problem finding and framing, along with more directly observable behaviors such as prototyping and tool exploration. Affect included participants’ feelings, such as motivation and creative agency. The social category included the courses’ community and its dimensions. Collapsing activity to fewer than these three categories would impair meaningful discussion of it.

Attendees will be asked to use supplied handouts to describe environments familiar to them in terms of activity systems. This brief activity will be followed by a group discussion in which results from the group will be compared to better illuminate the adaptive power of activity theory as an analytical framework for a wide range of learning environments.

These findings suggested the course was similar to what Engeström (2014) called a humanized activity system—a system in which participants enjoy high degrees of freedom in their work.

These findings suggested the course was similar to what Engeström (2014) called a humanized activity system—a system in which participants enjoy high degrees of freedom in their work. The co-emergence of intrinsic motivation and creative agency with expanded tool ability suggested this course was similar to the formative interventions as discussed by (Sannino et al., 2016; Sannino, 2011), in which participant development results in participants learning to use a systems approach to take ownership of their learning and apply learned strategies to new, unforeseen, and ill-structured problems. Thus, this research points to a blueprint for a systems framework for expanding (and researching) the diversity of individuals’ interests and creative design ability as collective design hubs that can effect change across an eclectic and interdisciplinary group of learners and knowledge domains.