Towards enterprising design: a creativity framework supporting the fluency, flexibility and flow of student fashion designers

The importance of enterprising behaviour for employment and self-employment opportunities is becoming increasingly more valid in the rapidly changing times of today. Enterprising design may be particularly important for the transformation of depleting industries such as the South African Clothing industry. The conceptual process of creative fashion design that incorporates designing for clients is a suitable vehicle for training enterprising design as both these processes require creative problem solving. This paper reports on a creativity framework that was developed for enterprising fashion design students in a tertiary institution in South Africa. The constructs associated with creativity: fluency, flexibility and flow are synthesised with the positive emotion theory to propose a conjecture for the study and is then validated and refined with the findings. A qualitative research method was applied during the design process of thirteen final year fashion design students. Findings indicated that fluency, flexibility and flow are relevant skills for creative conceptual design. The positive emotions that should be stimulated to enhance the awareness and consequently the open mindedness of participants to support their creativity was: interest, joy, contentment and pride. The importance of these emotions to deal with challenges to attain enterprising goals such as balancing personal style and needs of a client is validated in the findings and incorporated in the proposed framework.