Connecting creative product design processes to creative product design outcomes: A scoping review

Abstract

Generating repeatable guidelines for designing creative products has long been an aim of the design research community. Even so, a widely trusted or agreed-upon process has not yet emerged. As a first step toward this goal, it is important to take stock of the reported connections between creative design processes and creative design outcomes. Thus, we conducted a scoping review focusing on creative prod-uct design. Our search identified 130 papers published from 1969 to 2021. The most frequent study type was a proposal paper (n = 53). Twenty-seven of the included papers used experimental methods. When connecting the creative design process to the outcome, 72 papers theorized about how the targeted design process could influence design outcome creativity; 58 papers used empirical methods to assess outcome creativity. These findings suggest that more empirical studies are needed to examine the process-to-outcome association in creative product design.