Linkographic Evidence for Concurrent Divergent and Convergent Thinking in Creative Design

Abstract

For a long time, the creativity literature has stressed the role of divergent thinking in creative endeavor. More recently, it has been recognized that convergent thinking also has a role in creativity, and the design literature, which sees design as a creative activity a priori, has largely adopted this view: Divergent and convergent thinking are seen as occurring in cyclic phases within the design process. Neurological evidence suggests that frequent shifts between defocused and focused attention to stimuli in memory activation, which equate divergent and convergent thinking, are a hallmark of creative thinking. In this article, we use linkography to show that the shifts between divergent thinking—forelinking of design moves, and convergent thinking—backlinking of moves, are so frequent that at the cognitive scale they can be seen as occurring concurrently in the ideation phase of creative designing. It is proposed that in assessments of creative potential, shifts between divergent and convergent thinking should be the yardstick instead of, or alongside measurements of divergent thinking.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

An initial draft of this research presented at the International Conference on Human Behavior in Design, October 14-17, 2014, Ascona, Switzerland, and was published in the compendium of conference papers (no page numbers).

Notes

¹ Despite Evans and Stanovich’s (Evans & Stanovich, 2013) analysis of the various terms and their preference for types of processing, I find modes of thinking more appropriate in the current discussion. However, I strongly disagree with these researchers’ claim that modes are cognitive styles that are manifest within Type 2 thinking.

² The study was headed by Donald Schön and William Porter in the Architecture Department at MIT, with the support of National Science Foundation grant #8611357-DMC.