Design Process of a Designer / Maker

‘Creativity in the design process is often characterised by the occurrence of a significant event – the so-called ‘creative leap’. Sometimes such an event occurs as a sudden insight which the designer immediately recognises as significant, but often it is only in retrospect that the designer (or an observer of the design process) is able to identify a point during the design process at which the key concept began to emerge. ….accounts of creative events in design made by the designers themselves may not be wholly reliable. However, some recent descriptive, empirical studies of the creative event have begun to shed more light on this mysterious (and often mystified) aspect of design. ….Studying creative design is seen as problematic because there can be no guarantee that a creative ‘event’ will occur during a design process, and because of the difficulty of identifying a solution idea as ‘creative’. But in every design project creativity can be found – if not in the apparent form of a distinct creative event, then as the evolution of a unique solution possessing some degree of creativity’

‘Surprise is what keeps a designer from routine behaviour. The ‘surprising’ parts of a problem or solution drive the originality streak in a design project. The process of evolution in the natural world is nowadays seen as driven by a reaction to a surprise (change in environment), rather than a gradual changing of a phenotype and genotype in an ever-closer approximation to an optimum in the fitness function. We suggest that creativity in the design process can validly be compared to such ‘bursts of development’.

DORST, KEES AND CROSS, NIGEL (2001). CREATIVITY IN THE DESIGN PROCESS: CO-EVOLUTION OF PROBLEM–SOLUTION. DESIGN STUDIES, 22(5), PP. 425–437.

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