A Creative Computing Approach to Optimising Citizens' Fashion Education based on Design Thinking for Responding to Micro-Level Needs of Smart City Development

This paper proposes a creative computing approach to introduce design thinking principles for optimising fashion design students' capabilities, thereby fulfilling the micro-level needs of smart city development. One of the most typical micro-level needs in smart cities is to optimise citizens' well-being and happiness through problem definition, solution generation and consensus-making based on quick, direct, and up-to-date data and information reflecting citizens' situations. Designers, as citizens and significant constructors of smart cities, usually dedicate themselves to optimising people's life qualities by creating products, services and artistic works based on people's needs. Therefore, the design industry usually expects practitioners to possess the capabilities of defining problems, creating concepts, gathering feedback and redesigning. These capabilities constitute the significant parts of the design thinking principles discussed and justify the importance of introducing design thinking. However, challenges still exist when introducing design thinking for instructors. The primary incentives behind these challenges are instructors' limited knowledge, making it difficult to be on the same page with students when selecting the topics, defining problems, and generating design concepts. A creative computing approach could complement instructors' knowledge to support students' topic selection and novel design generation through data collection, manipulation, and presentation. This approach consists of four modules: i) input module, ii) Topic Generation Module, iii) Topic-Design Connection Module, and iv) Supplementary Knowledge Library Module. The creative computing approach would provide a starting point for studying the possibilities of optimising the communication process between educators/instructors and students.