ABSTRACT
Creativity and critical thinking ultimately involve recombinations of larger areas of accrued knowledge known as "schemas" or "chunks". To foster a creative studio environment, many professors adopt what they believe to be an Itten-esque attitude: open-ended projects facilitating discovery, with both the student and instructor intuitively feeling their way toward a goal. Despite ideological differences between Walter Gropius and Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus, there was a shared sentiment about creativity as a fundamental pedagogic goal. Many beginning design instructors' goals contain an echo of Itten's primary pedagogical task: "To liberate the creative forces and thereby the artistic talents of the students". An appropriately structured problem defines a goal, but loosely—in other words, it provides a blurry target. Like an object materializing in fog, a blurry target is one that can generally be recognized by the group but of which there is no shared or clear understanding of a final form or process that constructs it.
