Creative risk-taking: Developing strategies for first year university students in the creative industries

Critical Analysis

Taking a risk means that something is at stake if the risk is not successful. Typically, a risk is not worthy of attention and consideration if the stakes are not high, or if the chance of failure is low. Walking across the street at a crosswalk carries a risk of getting hit by a car, but the chance of this occurring is low if the crosswalk sign is on. Walking itself carries a risk of stumbling, but a small misstep is easily corrected.

What’s clear with these simple examples, however, is that stakes are relative and situational. In some countries, cars regularly ignore crosswalks and traffic signals; at some times of day, cars are more or less aware of pedestrians; making eye-contact with a driver offers signals about if they intend to follow the stopping rules or ignore them. Stumbling while carrying something fragile has more implications than stumbling without carrying anything at all.

Risk-taking is embodied; the risk, and the taking of it, occur as a situation emerges. Creativity, at least as a process, is also embodied and emergent. In a design studio, creativity is expected to be shown; it is not enough to have a “creative idea,”—the idea must be materialized. One reason for this materialization is so the idea can be discussed or assessed. Another is more closely tied to the creative process itself: designerly ways of working require making a thing in order to provoke making more things, revisions and improvements to the thing itself. Creativity in design is not a process of “one and done,” and so if there is a form of risk-taking that occurs in creativity, it is likely aligned with material engagement and creative competence.

The authors position creativity as an exploratory activity, where the exploration is occurring in a space that is not fully defined. It is unclear what a student is searching for, and this view implies that a solution exists in the space, if only it can be found. This is one view of creative output and process; there are many others, such as a designerly way of producing new things in order to prompt the creation of the next new things. There is, in this case, a space of ideas only in that it is personally generated, and in real-time; if there is a search happening, a designer is looking through a canvas of their own making. They must have the ability to generate the ideas at a suitable level of quality so that they can react to what they, themselves, have made—in order to make the next thing.

A risk requires something to be staked, something to be gained or lost, and some aspect that is uncontrolled by the risk-taker. Many things may be at stake in the context of creativity. One may be the development of a form being made, based on manipulation of material. For example, a potter making wheel-thrown ceramics may “push” clay too far past its elasticity, and the item being made may collapse. Another staked quality may be reputational, as with a designer trying a new technique or working with a new subject matter that, when shared with an audience, is rejected. Still another may be identity-related: taking a risk that is viewed as unsuccessful may lead a designer to feel that they failed, or are a failure. And another risk may be financial, as with mass-produced items; offering a new software or product design carries costs of time, money, and opportunity, and a lack of sales or adoption may translate to financial loss.

The authors align most closely with the last view of risk-taking—that design activities should result in things that are innovative and that have never been seen before. They argue that “taking risks to explore the unknown is an essential element of creative and innovative processes.”

This view implies a relationship between taking creative risks, self-sufficiency, and career readiness. Students, they argue, are required to “have a willingness to take creative risks when they respond to creative challenges, producing original, innovative outcomes.” Creativity and innovation are generally considered valuable qualities to bring to professional practice; “preparing for the creative industries,” the authors argue, “requires developing capacities in both creativity and innovation.” Their subsequent empirical activities are based, in part, on Steer’s view that “orthodoxy is the antithesis of creativity.” Creativity, it appears, must be novel and even break established rules.

Creativity and design may be linked firmly to innovation (implying, therefore, the connection between design and business). But in an educational context, risk-taking is removed from commercial success. What, then, is staked and potentially lost?

If a student builds something that required them to task a risk and they or others determine that the risk was not successfully taken, the student may internalize not just a failure of execution but a failure of self; they may be correct—that they lacked the skills to successfully produce the idea they had, but then may misdirect the lack of skill (“I am bad at drawing”) to a judgement of character (“I am bad”). Of course, a student that makes something is taking a risk of execution simply by the nature of being a student. They haven’t yet learned hand skills and craftsmanship. If a student makes something that they feel may or may not succeed, and they have tied their emergent professional identity to the success of the creation, this may serve to erode their feelings of professional participation; they may not see themselves “as a designer.”

When a student presents the output of their creative risk to a group, the group may deem that the risk was not successful. This may impact how they judge the student’s future work, or even how they judge the student themselves. This was extremely common in the authors’ work— “the most evident theme that emerged in our findings is that many students identify their most significant creative risk as occurring in the context of group work.” This is a risk of exposure, not necessarily a risk implicit in the artifact being made.

If a student makes something that they feel was risky, and it is poorly graded—and the grade is attributed to some form of the risk-taking—this will likely impact what a student chooses to emphasize on subsequent projects; it is reasonable that they will avoid similar risk-taking behaviors in order to be assessed more positively. This, too, was a large finding from this study: that “students tend to perceive their creative risk-taking as closely connected to the risk of receiving poor grades.” These stakes clearly shift the conversation from a creative risk to an academic outcome.

The authors argue that the studio is a controllable aspect of fostering or limiting creative risk-taking. Educators who embrace creative risk-taking “must foster a supportive learning environment” where students “feel safe and confident to voice their differing views.” Risky designs are assumed to run counter to ideas that are already established, and rhetoric is the vehicle for students to justify their risk—they need to “develop competencies to cultivate and articulate their ‘voice’ in order to further challenge and refine existing values, structures, and processes.” The tie between innovation (something that has not been seen before) and creativity (something a student is made) hinges on the development of a convincing argument, and so a risk is successful if a student can convince others that it was successful. It is curious that the authors argue that “voicing one’s creative ideas to others is inherently risk,”—in design school, creative output is typically visual, yet it is not the showing of the ideas as much as the telling about them that is what is viewed as a risk. The authors describe this as “the distance between the student generating the idea and then having the practical skills to realise, present and communicate it.”

An environment can also foster this form of risk-taking by being “flexible, playful, and open,” with “adequate time to investigate.” Experimentation is tied to risks, presumably to give students a chance to “find” a solution in the aforementioned canvas of opportunity; this, the authors argue, requires time for reflection. An example of this is offered from the authors’ curricular design, which asks the students to “think retrospectively about a moment when you felt like you took a significant creative risk.”

Repeated exposure to the same topic is also considered an ingredient of a studio conducive to risk-taking, or at least to the development of an original idea or approach to making. The authors state “disparate elements come together cognitively over time.” It’s unclear which elements and which aspects of cognition are being considered, and it is challenged by the output of the study itself—students describe their risk-taking as occurring suddenly, but this is discounted as merely self-talk about their abilities.

Assessment itself can shift to emphasize a review of change from one part of a project to another; this implies that change itself is evidence of a risk having been taking, although it seems to more accurately show evidence of iteration occurring.

It’s useful to return to the nature of risk in education. It’s unclear why putting things at stake in an educational studio is valued. Cited literature that ties creativity, design and innovation together claim that developing things that are new or novel is valuable, innovative designs are perhaps the most valuable output of design, and innovation may simply be inextricable from design itself. This assertion makes incomplete assumptions about what design is, and what design is for. It also presupposes that innovation is actually what an employer wants, and that the ability to come up with new ideas is a desired quality in a junior designer. It’s more likely that someone out of school will be tasked not with coming up with things that are novel, but with things that are competent, with requirements clearly delineated and output expected.

Abilities in rhetoric to substantiate an innovation are desired skills for design graduates. But recent graduates are likely going to be substantiating a solution that is not new, and that required no objective risk to be taken. The organizational stakes, for a junior designer, are small, even if the stakes for that specific designer are large. The language of risk, then, may be better served to be oriented around a development of confidence rather than the creation of something new, novel, and innovative; studio education might work to minimize innovation risk and maximize personal, identity, and social risk, and the supportive constructs around it.