How good are good ideas? Correlates of design creativity

Abstract

The design studio, at the heart of design education everywhere, embodies the underlying presumption that students who work side by side, and often in collaboration, benefit from being exposed to a large number of ideas of peers and instructors. Good ideas, it is believed, are the base for creative design processes. In this study we follow ideas as communicated in the studio during a semester-long exercise. We ask: when and how are ideas influential? Which ideas qualify as good ideas, and how are they developed? How do they lead to a good product? Previous research, which is briefly reviewed here, shows that influential (critical, in our terminology) ideas share a fundamental property: they are richly interlinked with other ideas. In this paper we substantiate this tenet by showing that this is also the case in the design studio. In addition, we look at other properties of design ideas and correlate them with students' project grades, which are indicative of successful, and creative, design outcomes.