Reshaping the Box: Creative designing as constraint management
Reshaping the Box:
Creative designing as constraint management
Faculty of Technology, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.
Design Group, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.
International Journal of Product Development, volume 11 number 3/4, 241-255 (2010).
Special issue on Fostering Out-Of-The-Box Creativity in New Product Development edited by Carmen Kobe, Ina Goller and Jannis Faupel.
ABSTRACT. The nature of novel idea creation in design depends on the nature of the design challenge: how requirements and constraints not only determine what is acceptable but shape thinking. This paper explores how overconstrained and underconstrained problems are tackled in fundamentally different ways, using engineering design, knitwear design and software development as exemplars. Problem framing as well as the iterative reformulation of the design problem is crucial in all fields but is done very differently. However, designers face a variety of types of problem, including problems resembling those typical in other industries; this paper argues that a wider awareness of the creative thinking methods used in other industries would aid designers in many fields to tackle unfamiliar problems.
KEYWORDS. Types of design, creativity, cognition, constraint management, overconstrained problems, underconstrained problems, problem framing, requirements specification
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Martin Stacey
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Claudia Eckert
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