Nascent directions for design creativity research

Design is recognized as one of the creative professions but that does notmean that design equals creativity. Much of design is not creative, rather it is routine in the sense that the designs produced are those that are similar to existing designs and are only unique in terms of the situation they are in. However, there is value in producing designs that are considered creative in that they add significant value and change people’s perceptions and, in doing so, have the potential to change society by changing its value system. A search for the terms ‘design’ and ‘creativity’ in books over the last 200 years (using Google’s Ngram) shows that the term “design’ was well established by 1800 and its use dropped between 1800 and 1900, after which its use increased to 2000. The term ‘creativity’ only came into noticeable use from 1940 on (Figure 1). It is, therefore, not surprising that creativity research is a young field. Much of early design creativity research has focused on distinguishing design creativity from designing; typically, by attempting to determine when and how a designer was being creative while they were designing. This still remains an important area of design creativity research that deserves considerable attention. Much of the design creativity research over the last 30–40 years has focused on either cognitive studies of designers or on building computational models of creative processes, generally using artificial intelligence or cognitive models. As in other areas of design research, there has been interest in developing cognitive creativity support tools. These two paradigmatic approaches have yielded interesting and important results. Tools can be categorized along a spectrum from passive through responsive to active. Passive tools need to be directly invoked by the designer and remain unchanged by their use. A spreadsheet is an exemplary example of a general passive tool. Passive tools that support design creativity include, for example, morphological analysis and TRIZ. Responsive tools need to be directly invoked by the designer but are changed by their use and do so by learning (Gero, 1996). They aim to tailor their response to the user over time. They tend to be developed for a specific purpose and are often proprietary. Active tools interact with the designer, i.e., they respond to what the designer is doing and make proposals. More recently, there has been interest in studying creativity when the designer is using responsive and active creativity aids. These aids cover a wide spectrum. Here two new categories will be considered: artificial intelligence that supports co-creation and neuro-based creativity enhancement. These two approaches form the basis of two nascent directions that are fundamentally different to the current directions of cognitive studies and passive cognitive support tools. In addition, there have been studies with drugs that affect the brain and that anecdotally enhance creativity. Alcohol has been shown to have a mild positive effect on the remote association creativity test but impairs divergent thinking, which is involved in design creativity (Norlander, 1999). However, controlled studies with Ritalin (methylphenidate) (Baas et al., 2020), cannabis (tetrahydrocannabinol) (Kowal et al., 2015) and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide)