Beñat Flores: “The university is an excellent educational stage for boosting creativity”

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Beñat Flores: “The university is an excellent educational stage for boosting creativity”

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Beñat Flores: “The university is an excellent educational stage for boosting creativity”

Beñat Flores earned the cum laude designation for his international dissertation entitled “Exploring the impact of Design Thinking on higher education students’ creative self-efficacy / Design Thinkingaren eragina aztertzen unibersitate ikasleen auto-eraginkortasun sortzailean,” which he defended in October.

2020·11·16

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On October 30, Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences researcher Beñat Flores (Lezo, 1992) defended his dissertation entitled “Exploring the impact of Design Thinking on higher education students’ creative self-efficacy / Design Thinkingaren eragina aztertzen unibersitate ikasleen auto-eraginkortasun sortzailean.” The defense was held online and earned the cum laude designation.

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a process or methodology whose objective is to provide an innovative response to a given problem, project or challenge. To achieve this objective, Design Thinking consists of different phases (three, five, seven or more, depending on the model), but they all have one thing in common: they use the mentality and techniques of mechanical engineering designers. It was first developed theoretically at Stanford University in the 1970s and now is used in hundreds of institutions worldwide because, among other reasons, it can be applied in any setting.

What does this methodology contribute in education?

The creative ability is essential to address future (and present!) challenges. There’s a certain discrepancy between what challenges require and what education provides. For example, every year LinkedIn creates a list of the “soft skills” or general skills most necessary in the work world, and in both 2019 and 2020, creativity topped the list. However, education has often been criticized for not cultivating creativity, but instead emphasizing logical or rational thought. The university is an excellent educational stage for boosting creativity.

You analyzed the impact of Design Thinking on the creative self-efficacy of university students. What are the most notable results of your study?

In the Audiovisual Communication program, we designed a 15-week intervention program that follows the Design Thinking process, and for my doctoral dissertation, I wanted to analyze what impact that had on students’ creative self-efficacy. Creative self-efficacy is the perception that an individual has about his or her own creativity, and it includes various dimensions. The results of the study demonstrate that our Design Thinking-based program helped Audiovisual Communication students to feel more creative to some extent.

What sample did you use for your study?

The dissertation had two main phases. First, we adapted and validated a questionnaire on creative self-efficacy from the English version, and then we used that questionnaire to measure the impact of our Design Thinking-based intervention program on the creative self-efficacy of a small number of students. For the first task, we had 572 participants, including Psychology and Audiovisual Communication students from the University of the Basque Country as well as Education and Audiovisual Communication students from Mondragon University. For the second phase, the sample was only 93 people, all Audiovisual Communication students from either Mondragon University or the University of the Basque Country.

Your dissertation is designated as international. Can you describe your work process?

In order to receive the international designation, you have to meet a set of requirements, one of which, probably the most important in my case, is spending at least 3 months in a research center abroad. Since Design Thinking was created at Stanford University, my first choice was to try to do it there. And to my surprise, they accepted me as a Visiting Research Student at Stanford’s Center for Design Research. While I was there, I had the opportunity to talk about my project with researchers whose scientific articles I had read, which gave a huge boost to my research. I totally changed the design and it was almost like starting from scratch when I came back from Stanford. We also had seminars every week that I attended as an observer to see how they were implementing Design Thinking in their ME310 Master’s-level classes.

What lines of research does your work open?

We have identified three lines of research. First, our intervention program needs to be reformulated based on Design Thinking so that it will have a greater impact on students’ creative self-efficacy. We’ve already made some changes and are now following up on those. Second, we want to translate the measurement tool into Basque because it was not possible, in the dissertation process, to adapt it and validate it in any language other than Spanish. And finally, we think it would be interesting to create a questionnaire to measure the creative efficacy of a group, since creative tasks are often carried out within a group structure. We believe that the group could have an influence on individual creative self-efficacy.

Was there anything that surprised you in your research process?

I think very little is said about the real learning that comes with writing a doctoral dissertation. Can you become an “expert” in a specific area within a specific topic? Maybe. But I would say that going through this process taught me a lot more about myself than about creative self-efficacy or Design Thinking. Various crises arose as I was writing the dissertation, and I realized that in order to deal with them, I was using strategies and strengths that perhaps I didn’t even know I had. But I didn’t go through the process alone and I knew I could always count on the help and support of my dissertation directors.