Identity and affect in design cognition

Much Design Research effort has been afforded to investigating how designers think and what they do; often in the form of protocol analysis. These investigations have mainly focused on how designers influence material culture however, little attention has been paid to another line of enquiry; that is how the act of designing affects the individual undertaking the work and the role of social psychological phenomena e.g. attitudes, evaluations, emotions, impressions, motivations and social behaviour - on design activity. This interplay of affect between design activity and a designer’s social psychological behaviour is a complex two way process that warrants further investigation. Our research agenda focuses on the individual undertaking design activity and asks how does designing affect the designer and their behaviour? In this paper two issues are addressed: 1. The immediate effects of design activity on the designer 2. The role of self-concept in design cognition These two issues are investigated through a series of experiments carried out under semi-controlled conditions using several forms of observation and novel self-concept inventories. This paper draws attention to the need to consider self-concept and affect in design cognition and introduces the idea of design identity, which is uniquely different to the concept of design experience often quoted in the literature. This is an area of the ongoing research agenda within the Department of Design and Technology, Loughborough University, UK. Keywords: Design Activity; Design Behaviour; Psychology of Design; Self-Concept; Immediate Effects</p

Panel: Individual and/versus social creativity

The creative act is often thought of as an individual, even lonely, one: the inspiration in the bath, the artist isolated in the garret. The research student has to demonstrate that they found new knowledge and that it was “all their own work”. But how often are these individual acts a realistic model of the creative process? Even if inspiration does come in the bath, how many conversations had taken place before that moment? How much time has the “lonely” artist spent in cafes arguing with other artists about their work? If individual research is so important why do we advise a good student to join a successful research department

Creativity and Information Systems in a Hypercompetitive Environment: A Literature Review

In today’s hypercompetitive environment in which markets change rapidly and competitive advantages are difficult to sustain, companies are forced to innovate and identify new business opportunities. However, innovation requires ingenuity and creativity. Product and service development depends on the creativity of employees, but harvesting and bringing novel ideas to fruition is often a chaotic process, which underscores the importance of creativity management within organizations. In this article, we review the literature on creativity in an effort to summarize state-of-the-art knowledge on how to stimulate creativity and spur innovation in modern organizations. For that purpose, we use Rhodes’ 4-Ps model (1961) distinguishing between creative environments (called press), people, products, and processes. Through a review of 110 journals on the AIS journal list, this article offers insights―based on eighty-eight articles―into how creativity can be stimulated and supported by attending to each of these components. The literature teaches us how to utilize, evaluate, and strategize about creativity in organizational settings. Managers are advised to advance creativity and ideation processes, for example by building virtual environments that strengthen collaboration and creativity across organizational boundaries. Researchers are encouraged to investigate the relationship between strategy and information systems (IS) usage in fostering creativity

Exploring the user experience through collage

We explore the use of collage in requirements elicitation, as a tool to support potential end-users in expressing their impressions, understanding, and emotions regarding a system

Concept Blending and Dissimilarity: Factors for Creative Design Process: A Comparison between the Linguistic Interpretation Process and Design Process

This study investigated the design process in order to clarify the characteristics of the essence of the creative design process vis-à-vis the interpretation process, by carrying out design experiments. The authors analyzed the characteristics of the creative design process by comparing it with the linguistic interpretation process, from the viewpoints of thought types (analogy, blending, and thematic relation) and recognition types (commonalities and alignable and nonalignable differences). A new concept can be created by using the noun-noun phrase as the process of synthesizing two concepts—the simplest and most essential process in formulating a new concept from existing ones. Furthermore, the noun-noun phrase can be interpreted in a natural way. In our experiment, the subjects were required to interpret a novel noun-noun phrase, create a design concept from the same noun-noun phrase, and list the similarities and dissimilarities between the two nouns. The authors compare the results of the thought types and recognition types, focusing on the perspective of the manner in which things were viewed, i.e., in terms of similarities and dissimilarities. A comparison of the results reveals that blending and nonalignable differences characterize the creative design process. The findings of this research will contribute a framework of design practice, to enhance both students’ and designers’ creativity for concept formation in design, which relates to the development of innovative design. Keywords: Noun-Noun phrase; Design; Creativity; Blending; Nonalignable difference</p

Why bad ideas are a good idea

What would happen if we wrote an Abstract that was the exact opposite of what the paper described? This is a bad idea, but it makes us think more carefully than usual about properties of Abstracts. This paper describes BadIdeas, a collection of techniques that uses ???bad??? or ???silly??? ideas to inspire creativity, explore design domains and teach critical thinking in interaction design. We describe the approach, some evidence, how it is performed in practice and experience in its use.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Metacognition and knowledge application: an empirical study in product design education

The relationship between creativity and knowledge has been a debated topic in creativity and design research. Current studies have made a great effort to emphasise the significance to creativity of a specific type of knowledge, e.g. domain-specific/general, rather than interpreting their application, i.e. how they are used. That is, there is still a lack of studies to investigate the ways in which knowledge and skills within or across domains are actually used, since Christiaans and Venselaar (2005) have claimed. The lack of a performance-based measurement of creativity probably renders it difficult to ascertain whether a specific knowledge item is related to a specific creative performance. Moreover, the methodologies applied by current studies to design knowledge and creativity were based on qualitative approaches drawn from data collected from a single school in one country, ignoring the importance of the cultural context.This thesis is supported by an investigation of a creativity-relevant construct that connects to knowledge application within the context of Product Design Education. The principal creativity-relevant construct is identified as metacognition: this identification was achieved by conducting a literature survey focusing on creativity research, which is linked to creative thinking, according to current understanding of applied knowledge, and is thought to predict creative performance. Different kinds of knowledge applied in product design students’ final-year design projects (FYDPs) have been assembled and arranged into three categories. An empirical study was conducted in the form of a survey to examine the relationship between metacognition and the frequency of applying each kind of knowledge in the process of the FYDP. Cultural factors were also considered in this study based on 375 samples collected from China (228 samples) and the UK (147 samples), representing Western and Eastern cultures. The findings identified the shared and different frequencies of applying subject-related knowledge among students with different levels of creative thinking ability. The thesis proposes five aspects of subject-related knowledge, including product-oriented, reflection-facilitating, socio-cultural environment related, conceptual-process related, and cross-disciplinary knowledge. The data indicates that product-oriented, reflection-facilitating, and socio-cultural environment related knowledge are frequently applied by students who reported higher metacognition scores. The main contribution to knowledge made through this thesis is towards design education research, where these findings may inform and extend academic support for design tutors and students to improve the FYDP process and offer further insights into China’s design education.</div

Observing creative behaviours

Sketching and 3D modelling have been long recognised as creative designing tools, but the role that CAD should play remains contested. Research by Charlesworth (2007) has suggested that CAD does not support creativity whereas findings by Robertson and Radcliffe (2008) imply that CAD when used with other design tools does enable creativity to be fostered. Prior research by the authors has shown evidence of creative behaviours whilst designing with CAD (Musta’amal et al, 2008a and 2008b). Potentially useful by-products of this research have been literature reviews concerning creative behaviours that have been reported by cognitive psychologists (Musta’amal et al, 2009 in-press) and also behaviours that have been reported by design researchers as being observed when 2D and 3D sketch modelling have been used. The results of these literature reviews have been placed into categories. Seven categories of creative behaviours were adopted for the creative behaviours reported by cognitive psychologists. The 2D sketching behaviours have been placed in 8 categories and 3D sketch modelling reported into 3 categories. Data concerning these behaviours has been gathered using protocol analysis, interviews and diary methods on 4 design projects, including a project carried out by one of the authors. This paper will describe the outcomes of the literature reviews and provide examples from design projects of the categories of reported creative behaviours. The potential usefulness of these categories for the observation of creative behaviours in classrooms and studios is discussed

CAD as a ‘recording’ or ‘designing’ tool: evidence from user behaviours

Previously published research has explored the implications of using CAD for the quality of design development, and the quality of design outcomes (Fraser & Hodgson, 2007; Hodgson & Fraser, 2006; Hodgson & Fraser, 2005; Kimbell et al, 2002). Prior study has also revealed, that users’ perceptions affect how CAD is applied, and reflect the benefits received from such use (Robertson & Allen, 1991). In order to link creativity to the use of CAD, a literature review concerning behaviours associated with creativity was conducted. This was discussed in a PowerPoint presentation presented at the 2007 Design and Technology Association International Research Conference. A framework of seven groups of creative behaviour were identified, particularly ‘Novelty’, ‘Appropriateness’, ‘Motivation’, ‘Fluency’, ‘Flexibility’, ’Sensitivity’, and ‘Insightfulness’. Evidence for these behaviours when using CAD was sought by a number of research methods such as interviews, protocol analysis, observations, and design diaries. This paper is reporting part of an initial study undertaken to research the implications of using CAD for creativity in designing. A smallscale case study exploration based on the masters projects by four postgraduate students from the Design and Technology Department at Loughborough University has been carried out. The results from the current research showed that the use of CAD in designing was linked to design behaviours associated with creativity in the literature