Exploring the effects of a user feedback strategy on students’ creative thinking in a design-based project

The development of students’ creativity, especially creative thinking skills, has been increasingly promoted in school education, mainly through design-based projects. Creative thinking in a design-based project emphasizes not only the generation of diverse ideas to design innovative solutions to solve a problem, but more importantly the development of new understanding of the problem from diverse perspectives. Existing studies have focused on idea generation, with little attention paid to problem understanding. Building empathy, i.e., understanding the needs of the users for whom the design is intended, can help students or novice designers develop new understanding of the problem. However, few studies have explored how students’ creative thinking in a design project can be enhanced through a deeper understanding of user needs. This study aims to explore the effects of a user feedback strategy, i.e., providing students with user feedback regarding their understanding of user needs, on developing their empathy and creativity in problem understanding and idea generation in a design project. The participants were 172 sixth-grade primary students from four classes. The four classes were randomly assigned to either the experimental condition receiving user feedback or the control condition without user feedback. Students worked in groups of 4–6 members to design playground facilities for younger children. The results show that students in the experimental condition demonstrated significantly better performance in problem understanding and design ideation. Students’ comments revealed that the user feedback they received stimulated their reflection on understanding user needs and inspired them to think from multiple perspectives.