Code to Decode: A New Approach Toward Creative Thinking
摘要
Everyone has a creative side in them, but in the process of creating new ideas, students end up facing a mental block wherein they are stuck in coming up with new innovative ideas. So, with the advent of the digital age, the merging of art and technology has opened up a new world called “creative coding.” This multidisciplinary, innovative practice has enabled artists, designers, and developers to create a new discipline that supports their creative thinking through programming, leading to exciting phygital experiences, generative art, and interactive installations. Through creative coding, students learn how to think outside the box and develop creative approaches to storytelling, user experience, and engagements. As part of the study, this practice was taught to various departments of design (product, fashion, interior, animation, interaction design), with a total of 60 students enrolled in each department. The model used for the teaching includes a decoding phase where students learn about processes and methodology used in the existing system to create an experience, then a story phase where students build their story around the new experience according to the expectations of the user, and finally, an encode phase where students code to create the experience. In this study, we used software such as Tinkercad, Arduino IDE, etc., to teach students how to create logic, and syntactical constructs for coding various sensors were used to help student understand how experiences could be created. The main finding of this study was that with decode, story, and encode mode, students are more receptive to creative thinking and idea generation. They are not blocked by a lack of ideation, which most students struggle with.