Our founder Angelina Lo-Chui (Angie) has devoted the past few years to her PhD study researching children’s creativity and their design process. Let her tell us more about her thoughts and vision.
Why did you decide to do a PhD Study?
After years of practice, I was searching for existing theories to explain why and how children think and behave during their act of creating. I wanted CreativeKids to move on to a new level of understanding children based on disciplined observation and empirical evidence. We are entering our 30th year of working with children, parents, teachers, artists, designers and people locally and internationally. I’ve identified on-going research on the cultivation of creativity, as the long-term direction of CreativeKids’ pedagogy, curriculum development and operational strategy. The aim is to contribute and exchange knowledge in the field of art and design education.
Why did you bring Research into CreativeKids?
Research is CreativeKids’ continuous quest to investigate experiences and environments that foster children’s creativity through art and design. Research questions keep us curious and focused on children themselves. Results and findings remind us of how little we know about children’s creative motivation and processes. Children’s thinking, art-making and designing are often invisible and indescribable to adults. Through reflecting on our teaching approach and curriculum design, we gain insights into children’s inner world, of what drives their heads, hearts and hands in the act of creating. In short, research keeps us humble.
What is Playful Public Design?
Playful Public Design is a design research project we undertook since February 2019 to understand urban children’s concepts of a country park and their way of problem-setting and solving. Co-led with the Public Design Lab of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design (PolyU), and supported by the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) we were able to observe children’s creativity in action, in solving real-life problems with imaginative solutions.
In March 2020, the project was nominated by the Hong Kong Institute of Architects for the International Union of Architects’ Golden Cubes Awards (International level).
We would like to express our gratitude to all who participated in and supported the project, including PolyU, AFCD, our students, and their families.
Over the next weeks, we will be sharing our observations of children’s perception and solutions to problems they identified in the country park.
