Creativity in Design: Analyzing and Modeling the Creative Leap

What I read

In this text, the author examines a case-study example of designers creating a new object; he examines the process that led up to an important moment of consolidation of the ideas, and then proposes different ways that these moments come to bear.

First, the author sets the context of the study. Designers had previously worked to solve a design challenge, and their work had been recorded. The recording was shared during a workshop at a conference, and conference attendees analyzed and discussed the nature of insight and the process of design. The design challenge itself was focused on designing a new way to carry a hiker’s backpack on a bike. During the challenge, a “creative leap seems to have occurred as a sudden illumination in the team’s design process,” when a casual comment from a team-member introduced a new way of thinking about the outcome. This was a pivotal moment that then shaped the remainder of the design project. The author discusses this in more detail.

The designers created a project plan that allocated time for each activity; this was a linear plan. During the exploration phases, the team members broke the larger problem into subproblems, and then discussed and sketched different ideas to address those smaller problems. The author provides a brief excerpt from the transcript where the moment of insight appears to occur (when a team member mentions that idea of a tray, rather than a bag.) The text indicates that the tray was explicitly discussed after that point (by name), but was explored in a round-about fashion during the proceeding parts of the discussion. The author summarizes where the creative leap emerged: “It is recognizably a bridging concept between problem and solution that synthesizes and resolves a variety of goals and constraints, and it occurred during a "review" period after earlier periods of more deliberately generating concepts and ideas.”

Next, the author describes the way the design transcript and sketches were reviewed in the context of the workshop. Some of the participants developed different visualizations of the process they observed, described as “analytical models.” These include a phase model (separating clarifying the task, searching for concepts, and fixing the concept), a discourse model (showing the frequency of language related to different ways of working), a “work loci” graph showing the types of artifacts used during the exploration, and a “linkograph”, showing the relationship between design moves to one-another. None of these models indicate where the tray concept comes from directly.

The author describes that there are a variety of models for thinking about creative design that have emerged to explain how design works, some that have been developed in research into artificial intelligence. These include combination (of different ideas associated in the mind), mutation (focusing on a feature, and purposefully changing it), analogy (which the author points out has “long been regarded and suggested as a basis for creative design), first principles (the idea that designs emerge starting with requirements), and emergence (where an idea exists within an existing design.) First principles are further explained as “the core of any significant understanding of design—it assumes the theoretical position that designing starts with identifying requirements, or desired functions, and moving from these to appropriate forms or structures. It is the abductive leap of reasoning from function to form that is regarded as the kernel of design.”

The author reflects on the findings, particularly focused on the models. One clear observation is that creativity designing “seems to proceed by oscillating between sub solution and sub-problem area.” Another is the idea of a bridging concept—where two different models can be mapped to each other, and the creative process is the building of a bridge across the chasm between problem and solution. “It is the recognition of a satisfactory bridging concept that provides the illumination of the creative flash of insight.”

What I learned and what I think

What strikes me the most about this paper is that it was written and published in 1997, five years before writing Designerly Ways of Knowing, and a relatively long time ago, but we don’t have a real strong collective grasp of how design works in practice, still. It’s likely that that is because, at least in part, his ideas haven’t jumped from academia into the daily life of a practitioner, and could also be because practitioners are happy to make things without understanding how or why they are making them. I feel like good designers would be better designers with introspection into how their process actually works, but I don’t see a lot of them having the patience to work through a paper like this (which, honestly, isn’t even that flowery in language as is other academic work), or to model out their own process. It’s interesting to see the sticky nature of the thin IDEO design thinking model; maybe this type of work needs to be reduced if it has room in practice life. Or maybe Cross doesn’t actually care if it bridges into daily work, although I doubt it.

The different ways of modeling creative practice are interesting, at least in their uniqueness. The “linkograph” is a new one to me, and seems to have been created by Gabriela Goldschmidt, but I don’t see wide adoption of it. It seems like a model that’s valuable for the person making it, not for an audience—it’s an artifact on the way to understanding, not necessarily to provide knowledge. The simple horizontals showing different design phases is easy to understand, but places emphasis on the steps in a process, rather than the actual content of the process. I think the content is more important to analyze. I didn’t get a great sense for the before, during, and after of the “tray” epiphany, and I think that’s because the focus of the article was on the models, but I wish there had been models that zoomed way in to the emergence of that idea and less about where it stood in the larger act of designing.

We’re in a space of the science of design—of understanding how (if?) design happens in a methodical and modellable, and theoretically repeatable and practical and logical, manner. I appreciate the rigor of these types of maps and models, and find them useful in understanding the ideas that are being presented. I’m still skeptical, albeit less-so with these than with the “proving creativity”, that design actually is a science; the word carries and implies far too much objectivity for me. The process of design isn’t arbitrary, and it is modellable and understandable, and it has “most of the time” similarities, but it doesn’t follow laws like gravity. I think of Pat with his complete disaster of a process, and the pretty great things that pop out the end. If that were modeled and compared to this stuff, it would confound the researchers; how can this be that, too? But it is…

I feel dumb that I missed the abductive reasoning reference in this, and the source of it as cited of Roozenberg’s 1993 Design Studies article, when I was writing in 2010. I’m not sure how that happened, and maybe that again speaks to the lack of widespread adoption of these ideas, or to my lazy/shitty research and reading.