Everyday creativity in design process

The study of creativity in design has tended to emphasize its value and location in the individual designer as part of a statistically outlying population rather than as a normal characteristic of an entire population. Theories of creativity have generally stressed either its mysterious, gift-like qualities to an individual or as a constructed relationship between consumer and designer. This article, in developing a third view of creativity in design as a ‘normal’ phenomenon, describes a study of 1038 student design assignments obtained from a distance-learning course in Design Thinking. The article shows how normal distributions of design outputs can result from a large population following a structured design process. We argue that the creativity displayed is a natural result of the ‘grammar’ of that process. Seen in this way creativity becomes less of an individual ‘gift’ to a select minority, as generally understood, but an everyday occurrence to problems of design.