The Interplay between Creativity Issues and Design Theories: A New Perspective for Design Management Studies? (original) (raw)

How Design Theories Support Creativity - an Historical Perspective

2012

In this paper we analyse the relationship between creativity issues and design theory. Even if these two notions apparently correspond to two different academic fields (psychology, cognitive science and management for creativity; engineering science and logic for design theory), they appear as deeply related when it comes to innovation management. Analyzing three historical moments of design theory building (ratio method in 1850s catching up Germany, 20th century systematic design and 1920s Bauhaus theory), we show that there is a dialectical interplay that links creativity and design theory, articulated on the notion of "fixation effect": creativity identifies fixation effects, that become the targets of new design theories; design theories invent models of thought to overcome them -in turn these design theories might also create new fixation effects that will then be designated by creativity studies. This dialectical interplay leads to regularly invent new ways of managing innovation, ie new ways of managing knowledge, processes and organisations for innovating. We use this framework to analyse recent trends in creativity and design theories.

Design theories, creativity and innovation

The Elgar Companion to Innovation and Knowledge Creation

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between creativity issues and design theory. Although these two notions seemingly correspond to different academic fields (psychology, cognitive science and management for creativity; engineering science and logic for design theory), they appear to be deeply related when it comes to design methods and management. Analyzing three historical moments in design theorybuilding (the 1850s, with the ratio method for industrial upgrading in Germany; the 20 th century with systematic design and the 1920s with the Bauhaus theory), we point to the dialectical interplay that links creativity and design theory, structured around the notion of "fixation effect": creativity identifies fixation effects, which become the targets of new design theories; design theories invent models of thought to overcome them; and, in turn, these design theories can also create new fixation effects that will then be designated by creativity studies. This dialectical interplay leads to regular inventions of new ways of managing design, ie new ways of managing knowledge, processes and organizations for design activities. We use this framework to analyze recent trends in creativity and design theories.

Nascent directions for design creativity research

International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation

Design is recognized as one of the creative professions but that does not mean that design equals creativity. Much of design is not creative, rather it is routine in the sense that the designs produced are those that are similar to existing designs and are only unique in terms of the situation they are in. However, there is value in producing designs that are considered creative in that they add significant value and change people's perceptions and, in doing so, have the potential to change society by changing its value system. A search for the terms 'design' and 'creativity' in books over the last 200 years (using Google's Ngram) shows that the term "design' was well established by 1800 and its use dropped between 1800 and 1900, after which its use increased to 2000. The term 'creativity' only came into noticeable use from 1940 on (Figure 1). It is, therefore, not surprising that creativity research is a young field. Much of early design creativity research has focused on distinguishing design creativity from designing; typically, by attempting to determine when and how a designer was being creative while they were designing. This still remains an important area of design creativity research that deserves considerable attention. Much of the design creativity research over the last 30-40 years has focused on either cognitive studies of designers or on building computational models of creative processes, generally using artificial intelligence or cognitive models. As in other areas of design research, there has been interest in developing cognitive creativity support tools. These two paradigmatic approaches have yielded interesting and important results. Tools can be categorized along a spectrum from passive through responsive to active. Passive tools need to be directly invoked by the designer and remain unchanged by their use. A spreadsheet is an exemplary example of a general passive tool. Passive tools that support design creativity include, for example, morphological analysis and TRIZ. Responsive tools need to be directly invoked by the designer but are changed by their use and do so by learning (Gero, 1996). They aim to tailor their response to the user over time. They tend to be developed for a specific purpose and are often proprietary. Active tools interact with the designer, i.e., they respond to what the designer is doing and make proposals. More recently, there has been interest in studying creativity when the designer is using responsive and active creativity aids. These aids cover a wide spectrum. Here two new categories will be considered: artificial intelligence that supports co-creation and neuro-based creativity enhancement. These two approaches form the basis of two nascent directions that are fundamentally different to the current directions of cognitive studies and passive cognitive support tools. In addition, there have been studies with drugs that affect the brain and that anecdotally enhance creativity. Alcohol has been shown to have a mild positive effect on the remote association creativity test but impairs divergent thinking, which is involved in design creativity (Norlander, 1999). However, controlled studies with Ritalin (methylphenidate) (Baas et al., 2020), cannabis (tetrahydrocannabinol) (Kowal et al., 2015) and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Figure 1. Google's Ngram on the appearance of the terms "design" (blue line) and "creativity" (red line) in books since 1800.

Creativity and Design: Creativity's New Definition and its Relationship to Design

Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting Proceedings, 2009

Creativity is often defined in ways that are neither useful nor operationalizable. We proposed a new definition for creativity that incorporates the Skills-Rules-Knowledge model of . We then examine the tests of creativity and real world design problems alongside each other with this new definition in mind. Participants completed six different creativity tests, including the design problems. The tests were scored on the basis of five domains of creativity. Answers to questions an individual had seen previously were not included in data analysis. We expect to find that all measures of creativity correlate weakly with each other, and spatial, nonentrenchment, and original types of creativity correlate more highly with design than other types, providing further evidence for the importance of creativity for designers and engineers.

The Impact of Technology on Creativity in Design: An Enhancement?

Technology may be considered as an interface between individuals and the products they create,butwehavetodeterminewhethertheuseofnewsystemseffectivelyenhanceindividu- als’creativeactivities.Inthispaper,wepresentanewangleofreflectionthatweillustrateinthe fieldofcreativedesign,sinceitisaconstantchallengefordesignerstointroducecreativityinthe projects they work on. The approach we propose is centred on designers’ cognitive processes. We argue that both the development of new CAD (computer-aided design) systems and their assessment should be conducted on the basis of a deep understanding of designers’ cognitive processes.Inaccordancewiththisview,wepresentthreeempiricalstudiesthatwereconducted inordertoanalysetheimpactofnewdesignsupportsystemsondesigners’cognitiveprocesses. Therefore, the results we present contribute to further our knowledge of whether new CAD technologies effectively facilitate designers’ activities and enhance their creativity.

Future Directions for Design Creativity Research

Design Creativity 2010, 2011

This paper commences with a brief overview of where the creativity may lie in the enterprise of designing artifacts. It puts forward the concept that design creativity is not a unitary concept and needs to be treated multi-dimensionally by stating that design creativity may be in multiple locations. The paper then proceeds to present a brief overview of what has been researched and how it is has been researched. It classifies what has been researched under: design processes, cognitive behavior and interactions. This is followed by the articulation of future directions for design creativity research in the areas of: design processes; cognitive behavior, social interaction; cognitive neuroscience; measuring design creativity and test suites of design tasks.

The cognitive profile of creativity in design

Thinking Skills and Creativity, 2011

The objective of the study was to explore the cognitive profile of creativity in design by applying a new approach to the assessment of creativity based on the theory of meaning (Kreitler & Kreitler). The assessment of meaning enables to identify cognitive processes that characterize an individual as well as those necessary for good performance of some cognitive act, such

S-Creativity in the Design Process

2001

This paper utilises the notion of situatedness from cognitive science. We elaborate the concept of situatedness in the context of design, and further examine our empirical data for evidence of it. We propose a method to measure the novelty in the design process and a modified model of creativity called situated or s-creativity. 1. Creativity versus Novelty There is often a gap between computational and cognitive models of creative designing. One of the characteristics of designing being its unpredictability. This unpredictability, however, can lead to novelty in the design process and then contributes to the creativity of the design. Most computational models tend to be deterministic so that modeling creativity in these models inevitably encounters the problem of modeling unpredictability. To explore this issue, this study examined the novelty produced in the design process. Within Csikszentmihalyi's (1996) creativity triangle this study focuses on personal level novelty. Person...

A Framework Supporting Creativity in the Design Process: A Systems theoretic Perspective

2000

This paper attempts to establish a systems-theoretic framework supporting creativity in the design process, where the design process is considered to have as its basis the cognitive process. The design process is considered as a purposeful and ongoing transformation of already complex representational structures and the production of newer ones, in order to fulfil an ill-defined goal. Creativity is considered