Editorial

As the famous quote by Nigel Cross indicates (‘Everyone can – and does – design’), designing occurs whenever we plan and execute actions to create changes in the external world. Design is becoming increasingly complex especially when the goal is to produce something new and valuable to be adopted by some target community, i.e., when we are designing for innovation. Ample research has shown that creativity plays a key role in designing for innovation activities. Therein lies the importance of articulating design creativity research in diverse yet connected streams, so as to cover all stages of inspiration, ideation and implementation, including the final exploitation of the design outcome.

The current issue of the International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation represents well the multi-faceted landscape of design creativity research, with contributions ranging from the impact of the design environment on design inspiration to the business-model innovation by design.

More specifically, the first paper ‘Embodied design: Design inspiration and mood improvement depend on perceived stimulus sources and predict satisfaction with an immersion experience’ by So enriches the discussion about the influence of a stimulus-rich environment on design inspiration by analyzing the difference between stimulus categories such as location, and passive/active interactions. Furthermore, it shows how mood improvement serves as a catalyst for design inspiration.

It is widely known that a very important role of designers is to anticipate how users and other stakeholders will perceive the products. Among influential factors, topological properties of a product shape can affect the user’s attention, as discussed through an experimental activity in the second paper, ‘Topological perception on attention to product shape’ by Fei and Nagai. As topological variations attract attention more than other types of variation, they could be used for highlighting technological shifts and, in general, the innovative features of a product.

The investigation of user’s perceptions typically involves a prototyping stage to explore parallel design concepts and gather their feedback. Prototyping has paramount importance also in educational activities, as it allows developing richer competencies and skills that impact design choices and, ultimately, individual creativity. Less common is the exploitation of prototyping in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), but the global diffusion of online learning platforms makes the topic extremely relevant for future developments in design education. On this thread, the paper ‘Exploring the diversity of creative prototyping in a global online learning environment’ by Jablokow et al. analyzes prototyping performance differences between genders, countries of origin and occupations. Understanding how this kind of characteristics of individuals are associated with different design performance measures could be helpful to further clarify the impact of diversity on design creativity.

The fourth paper ‘Business model innovation by design: a review of design’s role in business model innovation’ by Bryant et al. concludes this issue discussing the facilitating role that design can play in the innovation of business models, but also showing that a large proportion of the scientific literature in the field refers to design without really contributing anything to the advancement of the design body of knowledge. The paper also reveals that only one of the business model innovation mechanisms reflects the classical industrial design practice, and that there is a large possibility of exploring new models and techniques inspired by emerging design approaches.