Creativity and Design Reasoning: How C-K Theory Can Enhance Creative Design

Confronted today to increasing demand for innovation, engineers consider creativity as an indispensable albeit weird technique. How to combine the engineering design requirements for robustness and value achievement with the creativity capacity to get unheard original and varied ideas? How to control a “creative design process” with the rigor praised by engineering design? Based on recent theory of design reasoning, C-K theory, this paper shows that value, robustness, variety and originality can be efficiently combined in a theoretically grounded, well-mastered process. It shows how to avoid two main creative design traps, pseudo-creativity and bounded creativity; and how to manage two different types of creative design, value achievement vs value exploration creativity. These processes are illustrated on one specific case, the design of a “smart shopping cart”.

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