Designers are change agents in a society. They are one of the groups that add value in both economic and human terms. Design research focuses on understanding designing as a process. Much design research aims to understand routine designing in order to build tools that aid the designer, primarily by improving efficiency. As our understanding of routine designing increases, the topic of creativity in design attracts increasing interest as a means of widening the scope of our understanding of designing and as a basis for the development of tools that augment the designer's powers. In order to elucidate the nature of engineering design, issues related to the cognitive processes underlying design creativity are being studied and so are computational models of design creativity. Research into designing processes is starting to view designing as a social as well as technical process, and the understanding that the products of design involve human and social dimensions is growing. Studies of design creativity have gained increased importance in design conferences, and discussions on creativity have become important in all fields of design research, including engineering design.
For this Special Issue on Design Creativity of the Journal of Engineering Design, as a sign of increasing interest in this topic, more than 180 authors had expressed intentions and 51 papers were submitted. Through a rigorous peer-review process, five papers were eventually accepted. The selected papers consider two experimental studies on design creativity, a computational simulation approach to creative design, and two case studies on design creativity. These papers not only present the state of the art in research on design creativity, but also the diverse and multi-faceted nature of methods to stimulate and model design creativity and related practices.
Various methods focus on increasing creativity in conceptual design. Which methods are capable of producing more creative outcomes is an important practical problem. The special issue starts with an experimental study by Chulvi et al., addressing the problem of the degree of creativity of the outcomes of several design methods. It is entitled ‘Comparison of the degree of creativity in the design outcomes using different design methods’. In the design experiment carried out by the authors, a design team was asked to work applying three different design methods. The ‘degree of creativity’ of each design outcome is assessed by expert evaluation and by means of three different metrics. The results show that one design method provides more creative outcomes than were reached in a situation when no method was applied, while this was not the case for the other two methods.
The next paper, ‘Investigating Effects of Oppositely Related Semantic Stimuli on Design Concept Creativity’ by Chiu and Shu, focuses on the cognitive processes underlying design creativity and facilitating more creative design. The paper pays attention to the established relationship between language and cognition, and investigates the use of language to stimulate creative design. In this paper, two experiments are presented, where participants used opposite– and similar-word stimuli in conceptual design. The authors’ findings show that the designers using opposite-word stimuli developed more creative concepts. Additionally, the language analysis conducted showed that opposite stimuli elicited in designers’ behaviours that appear to encourage and support creative concept generation. The results allow the authors to propose a model explaining the interactions and effects of opposite-word stimulus on concept creativity.
The third paper, by Taura et al., is entitled ‘Constructive simulation of creative concept generation process in design: a research method for difficult-to-observe design-thinking processes’ and shows an advanced research methodology to approach the thought processes involved in creative design through computational simulation. To capture characteristics or patterns in the concept-generation process, which may lead to the generation of a creative design idea, this study employs a research framework called ‘constructive simulation’. The results suggest that thinking patterns in which explicit and ‘inexplicit’ concepts are continuously intertwined lead to creative design ideas.
The fourth paper, ‘Creativity from constraints in engineering design: lessons learned at Coloplast’ by Onarheim, presents a case study on the role of constraints in limiting and enhancing creativity in engineering design. A longitudinal participatory study was conducted at a major international producer of disposable medical equipment. The designers at the company were found to be highly constraint focused, and four main creative strategies for constraint manipulation were observed: blackboxing, removal, introducing and revising. Constraints introduced late in a project contributed to the generation of new solutions to old problems, and existing solutions were creatively adopted to satisfy new constraints. From these observations, recommendations on creative constraint-handling strategies were made.
Finally, this special issue concludes with a study on the connection of minimal changes and domain creativity, entitled ‘Change as little as possible: Creativity in design by modification’, by Eckert et al. The paper argues that while much design research has concentrated on creativity in the early phases of design and in very open-ended design tasks, in practice many design projects are concerned with modification or incremental development of existing systems to meet new needs and restrictions. This paper draws on two case studies, one examining the design of a new generation of diesel engines and one the refurbishment of a hospital ward, to argue that in these domains creativity is required to find designs that change as little as possible and meet the given requirements with minimal effort.
We hope that with this mix of papers, we manage to provide useful examples of research approaches to Design Creativity. We would like to thank the authors for their time and dedication in contributing to this special issue and for their efforts to incorporate the referees’ comments when revising their manuscripts. Moreover, we are especially grateful to all the referees, who generously gave their time and expertise to evaluate the submitted manuscripts. Without their dedication, this special issue would not have been possible.
Creativity still appears to be a mysterious issue of science. However, we already know that the essential force of design seems to be human creativity. This special issue perhaps aims to motivate innovative and dedicated researchers to gain knowledge of particular features of creative design and develop research methodologies to approach a better understanding of Design Creativity.