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PRESS RELEASE on 27 April 2008
MUSCAT Discover your own
creative potential: Invent a cardboard
chair, draw cars or houses from your
imagination, paint colorful patterns or make
your own slow-motion movie. These were tasks
given to the students of the German
University of Technology in Oman (GUtech)
during their Creative Design course in the
past semester.
“We want to develop a
creative attitude and encourage students to
solve problems in an open-minded manner. In
contrast to other subjects, the tasks given
do not have just one answer but rather many
answers,” stressed Professor Heiner
Hoffmann, who is currently teaching Creative
Design at GUtech together with his wife
Miriam, who is an arts teacher in Germany.
Both share a deep understanding of arts and
creativity, which they employ to inspire
GUtech foundation year students. Before
teaching at GUtech, Professor Heiner taught
for 13 years design and drawing at the
faculty of architecture, at RWTH Aachen
University in Germany and at other
universities in Europe, such as the
Universities of Zurich, Wuppertal and
Leicester.
“Creativity now is as
important in education as literacy and we
should treat it with the same status,” said
Sir Ken Robinson in a speech. Robinson is
educational advisor to public and private
organisations around the world, such as the
European Commission. Creativity is not
limited to arts. “A geologist at PDO who is
able to model the interior of the Earth,
without having ever seen it with her own
eyes, shows high levels of creativity. An
engineer at Nawras, who finds a smart
solution to increase the efficiency of the
telecommunication network displays
creativity. A negotiator who is able to get
two hostile parties (whether people,
companies or countries) to agree on a common
way ahead, shows creativity. Our society is
in need of original thinkers, who are able
to view the challenges that we are facing in
a holistic and systemic manner and have the
courage to propose conceptually new
solutions,” said Dr. Barbara Stauble,
Academic Director at GUtech.
During the past months at
GUtech, most of the 58 students discovered
their full creative potential for the first
time. They were used to arts classes at
high-school, but now creative design was a
completely new experience for most of them.
Azmat Areef had two hours
arts education at school, where she had to
stick to certain rules. However, now she
attends four hours of Creative Design at
GUtech with the Hoffmanns. “Creative design
is something unusual. You need to think out
of the box, but not in a way that makes you
tired. There are no set rules to follow,”
explained Azmat Areef, and her classmate
Taleed Rose added: “Creative Design is
different than other classes. For me it’s
really relaxing, you do not need to sit in
one place, where you cannot move. In a way,
I found that there are no restrictions.”
Azmat wants to become an IT expert and
Taleed wants to become an urban planner.
Unlike the other students, Taleed is also
painting and drawing during his freetime.
Besides the creative part of the lectures,
the students learned a lot about traditional
arts in Europe as well. “We presented them
different paintings of artists like Braques,
Cezanne and Paul Gaugin,” said Miriam
Hoffmann. Each of the different Creative
Design projects demanded different skills.
“It was really exciting to see that,
together with my friends Rumana and Hamda, I
can produce a chair in four hours and we can
even sit on it,” said Azmat. One of her
favorite assignments was to create her own
geometric design painting, for which she
personally chose the patterns and colors.
“I had never worked with
wall paintings before. That was really a
unique experience for me,” said Azmat while
standing in front of her colorful pattern.
Inspired by the Iranian mosaiques at Sultan
Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat, the Hoffmanns
decided to introduce colorful patterns in
their lectures. “In the beginning we were
just allowed to use one color then for the
second pattern we used four colors and mixed
them as well,” Azmat said. In the beginning,
Azmat wanted to have a red frame. “Professor
Hoffmann advised me not to choose the red
color so that not all the attention would be
taken away from the paintings,” she
explained. In the end Azmat seemed to have a
lot of fun with using blue, red, green and
yellow so that she even continued painting
at home.
Today about 50 different
patterns decorate the canteen of the German
University. “I think the students showed us
that they have changed the atmosphere of the
hall. The variety of the results is really
unlimited. You can see each student behind
the pattern,” said Hoffmann obviously proud
of the colorful results.
Creative Design is part
of the Foundation Year at GUtech. In autumn
of this year GUtech will introduce its four
Bachelor programmes in Urban Planning and
Architectural Design, Regional Management
and Tourism, Applied Information
Technologies and Applied Geosciences.
Admission for all programmes is open. GUtech
is located in Athaiba, just beside the beach
road.
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