The Creative Process in Design

Abstract

Society’s need for innovation is constantly growing, driven by a demand for new products. To help designers meet this need, we have to fully understand the creative process in design. In this chapter, Bonnardel, Wojtczuk, Gilles, and Mazon characterize creative design activities and provide descriptive models of creativity and design thinking. They then describe two complementary studies. In the first one, professional designers had to identify key stages and factors for their process of creative design thinking, via interviews and questionnaires. In the second one, design students were exposed to specific teaching methods, which allow an analysis of aspects of the design process related to divergent/convergent thinking. Bonnardel et al. use these results to highlight components of the creative design process that could be enhanced by particular teaching methods and/or computational systems.