A Look Behind the Creativity in Design

- conference report from Kobe, Japan

New types of creativity. Mary Lou Maher from the University of Sydney in Australia spoke about new types of creativity, which emerge in networks based on the new social web technologies. These technologies create a space where everybody can meet the same challenge and suggest new solutions. One example is threadless.com, where people can submit suggestions for T-shirt designs; the users then select the best designs, which will be put up for sale.
Illustration: threadless.com

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CONFERENCE REPORT The world is currently facing a host of challenges that can only be tackled with innovation. The demand for growth must be balanced with concerns for climate and sustainability, and globalisation has led to new conditions for the production and exchange of goods. A growing need to develop innovative solutions for complex problems makes it crucial to focus on innovation dynamics. At the conference on creativity in design, The First International Conference on Design Creativity in Kobe, Japan 30 November– 2 December 2010 one of the goals was to highlight an important driver of innovation: the creativity in and behind design.

By Mads Nygaard Folkmann

Autumn is a beautiful time of year in Japan. The temperature is pleasant, and the trees are aglow in blazing reds, yellows and browns. The setting puts body and mind at ease and thus provides ideal conditions for seeking new inspiration and new insights. This made Kobe in Japan the perfect meeting place for some one hundred researchers involved with design, engineering and cognition science, who debated design creativity during this three-day event.

If we can uncover the true nature of creativity and, specifically, the nature of design creativity, we can gain access to one of the driving forces behind innovation – creativity transformed into concrete design solutions. In large parts, the conference was driven by a strategically motivated optimism, as the main focus was on solving one of the mankind’s major questions: Where do new ideas come from, how can they be facilitated, and how can we ensure that they are realised and thus move on to new levels?

Reflections in the dark. The conference proceedings have already been published as a book and as a CD-ROM. Foto: Mads Nygaard Folkmann

Future Happiness

The importance of exploring creativity in design was made clear from the beginning of the conference. Chris McMahon, president of The Design Society, initiated this debate by emphasising the crucial role of the topic.
“In a sense, creativity is the essence of design,” he said, “This is about human inventiveness, and because the topic is so broad, a large number of disciplines have the capacity to make a contribution. But creativity can also play a crucial role for design, because we need a disruptive reorientation of design to handle the challenges of the 21st century.”

Professor Toshiharu Tauru of Kobe University in Japan was the conference chair. In his opening speech he also emphasised the future potential in a discussion – and perhaps a clarification – of design creativity.
“Design creativity is assumed to be different from the notion of merely ‘creativity’,” he explained.
“This question is believed to be strongly related to the question ‘Why do and can human beings design?’ Design, creativity and human beings belong together. Besides, design creativity is expected to be instrumental in not only addressing the social problems we are facing but also evoking an innate appreciation for beauty and happiness in our minds.”

The Study of Creativity

In a speech on the future directions for research into design creativity, one of the leading researchers in the field, Professor John S. Gero of Gerge Mason University in the USA, pointed out that creativity may spring from many sources, which opens up many avenues of research.
“This may involve, for example, studying the design, the design process, the designer, the interaction between user and design as well as society as the surrounding environment for design,” he said.

He pointed out that there had already been considerable research into the design process, but that there were few answers to the questions raised by research. He also described design as a discipline where, unlike the natural sciences, for example, the result cannot be repeated under identical conditions. Each process leads to a new result; otherwise, it is bad design. And that is exactly why it is important to continue to try to crack the code, John S. Gero argued.

With its choice of topics relating, in particular, to designers’ cognition and design processes the conference was also testimony to the fact that the effort of exploring creativity in the design object, in the relationship between design and user, and in the cultural context of design has barely begun. There is plenty of work still for future conferences on design creativity.

Seeking What Is New – Applicable, Funky and Demanding

A point consistently made about creativity in design was that the output should be new, applicable as well as unexpected. Still, several of the presentations painted a more complex picture. Christine Noweski of the Hasso Platner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, pointed out that true innovation probably springs from a combination of applicability and non-applicability. Only when not everything ‘fits’ can something truly new can emerge. True innovation also requires funky and demanding aspects; something that offers resistance.

Condensed knowledge. Part of the knowledge sharing at the conference was in the form of posters where researchers presented project findings and information. Foto: Mads Nygaard Folkmann

Katja Tschimmel of Escola Superior de Artes e Design in Porto, Portugal, emphasised that creativity in design aims to facilitate new patterns of understanding that may lead to new form expressions and types of messages.
“The creativity and originality in a design solution depends on whether and how one changes one’s perspective and perception in relation to the task. We may point out that it is productive to adopt a new perspective and to see things in new ways, but we can’t dictate how this should be achieved. Any design process is unique,” she explained.

Platform for Research Into Design Creativity

Katja Tschimmel also pointed out that a breakthrough in the research into design creativity will require a common platform that she did not think had been achieved yet.
“We need to find common ground,” she said. “Here, part of the challenge is to find a common language across disciplines, so that everybody – cognitive scientists, designers, architects, engineers, and media scientists – can speak to one another. That is the only way we are going to see results.”

Among the conference participants was Anders Brix, professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture. He presented the paper Artistic Versus Generic Design Creativity, which focused on the effects that the associated field have on the discourse about creativity. Someone working with the design of concrete tools will use a type of design- and material-dependent creativity that differs from generic creativity.

Anders Brix emphasises the importance of bringing one’s research into an international dialogue and of bringing back the perspectives of international research. This provides added insights, both externally, in relation to other people’s work, and internally, in relation to one’s own position in the research field.
“With creativity as its overarching concept, this is a conference that offers a range of interdisciplinary perspectives,” he explains.
“This is not an event that discusses core issues pertaining to the individual disciplines, there are projects that address creativity as an artistic and design-specific activity, which my paper also addresses. But the point is that the event serves as a good source of information and new ideas for a wide range of participants while also honing one’s own ideas in the encounter with different perspectives,” he says.