Development of creativity in students majoring in "Design" during the CREO course

Creativity as an essential property of the designer’s personality can be developed with the help of special methods and exercises. This article presents the characteristics and the results of the practical implementation of creativity development course originated by the author. Within the CREO course, the participants mastered the following idea generation methods: six thinking hats by Edward de Bono, bionic design method, anthropotechnics, inversion, PO (provocative ideas) method, brainstorming. The participants of the course were the first-third-year students of Kazan State Institute of Culture who were majoring in Textile Design and Artistic Ceramics. Changes in creativity development were revealed by an adapted version of E.P. Torrance test, which evaluated four parameters: fluency, flexibility, elaboration and originality. After completing the CREO course of creativity development, a slight positive dynamics in the control group and a tangible positive dynamics in the experimental group were revealed that proved the effectiveness of the chosen methods in the development of creativity in designers.