Bruner (1962) pointed out, creativity is a silent process that by its very nature will not be responsive to the processes ordinarily employed to determine content standards. His observation is that creativity requires its own set of questions, including examination of its nature. In this article I attempt to stimulate a conversation about the inculcation of creativity as an important goal of technology education, the purpose of which is to direct the attention of my colleagues in technology education to an area of the subject that remains under-explored.
In Design and Technology the concept of creativity is a quality that is highly valued, but not always well understood. Part of the reason for this is that while creativity underpins the substantial attention that has been devoted within recent times to design and problem solving, much of this attention is implicit rather than explicit. There is therefore a need for design and problem solving in technology education to be framed, not so much in terms of methodologies of engineers, but as opportunities for students to step outside of conventional reasoning processes imposed by the rest of the curriculum. Vision 2016 espouses a creative and productive nation and so in this context creativity has compelling claims to being the anchoring idea in such a framework.
