Abstract:

Our study aims to establish a few directions that might facilitate the transition from an essentially formal attitude in aesthetic assessment or judgement towards a creative attitude of the receptive onlooker – and a student, studying hard to become a specialist in his/her domain, starts by being mainly an onlooker who later projects his/her skills, experience and creativity onto the projects brought to life.

Such a goal could be reached through visual language and dialogue established between the creator of the aesthetic object and the onlooker, dialogue supported by an adequate graphic and visual systems, in total accord with the current informational and communication conditions. Visual expression that might become - through the aesthetic satisfaction - the subject of an answer given by the onlooker should be founded on approaches of representations based not only on limited conceptual realities, but also on the thoughts and emotions of people who are also deeply concerned with the true emotional and social values.

At Politehnica University of Bucharest, our department (Engineering Graphics and Industrial Design – Faculty of Aerospace Engineering) took under serious consideration the need to find a way to give the students not only the technical support they would use later, as specialists, but also a higher level of understanding the importance of the aesthetic side of any object they would design later.

In order to reach such a meaningful goal, we started by assessing the overall aesthetic view of a group of students, during their first year of studies – the results might help us to find the best way of developing their skills.

We used the Torrance Test (Figural B) and the Consensual Assessment Test (CAT – developed by Teresa M. Amabile) adapted to our goal, both tests being applied to a group of 50 students (6 girls and 44 boys) from the Faculty of Transports in our university.

The results were not spectacular, but it is a beginning and we already have a few suggestions that might help developing creativity and aesthetic understanding for our students. The study will be continued during the following years of study, enlarging the number of students to be tested.

Keywords:

Creativity, graphic and visual systems, formal aesthetic attitude.