Creativity in Design: Analyzing and Modeling the Creative Leap

The sudden insight provided by a “creative leap” is widely regarded as a characteristic feature of creative design. An example of such a creative leap occurred during a recorded study of the activity of a small design team. Several different analyses of the recorded design activity made by independent researchers confirm the critical role of this creative leap in the design process of the team. The author reviews some generic descriptive models of creative design for insight into the design team study and discusses issues for the computational modeling of creative design based on these observations. It is suggested that creative insight in design should be regarded as a perceptual bridge-building between problem and solution, rather than a leap.