Assessment criteria within China's industrial design education

Abstract

This paper discusses how industrial design lecturers in Chinese HE institutions evaluate understand creativity in students' design works in related design courses. First, through literature analysis, this study explores and sorts out how lecturers understand “creativity” in different cultural backgrounds. Secondly, the curriculum and syllabus of 5 institutions of higher learning in China1 were collected, and 64 selected industrial design lecturers from these five HE institutions were interviewed to evaluate design works which were completed by design students in the courses during the four-year long programmes. The purpose of this study is to further understand how lecturers evaluate students' design works and to explore their reasons. Through the analysis of the data collected from this interview, the results indicate that most lecturers have difficulties with providing concrete instances of what they mean by creativity, and subsequently they were unable to articulate criteria they used to assess students' creativity.