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Creativity is a critical component that feeds into all stages of innovation and design processes by promoting inspiration, ideation, and implementation of ideas, revealing the need for thorough research to support design creativity. Assessment of product creativity is a reoccurring topic in creativity research, while the role of consumer's knowledge of the creative process behind the product is fairly unexplored. In this paper, we present an empirical study investigating whether providing information about a complex development process could amplify consumer's perception of product creativity. Does storytelling about the process contribute to amplifying creativity ratings? What form of storytelling is needed to make an impact? Results from 134 respondents showed a small but not significant amplifying effect from the additional process information; however, an important learning can be drawn about the form of storytelling needed. An absolute minimal form was chosen here, displaying the need for investigating other, more elaborate forms. Additionally, the analysis showed that creativity was an important driver for the assessment of other product attributes such as purchasability, portraying the importance of design creativity and underlining the importance of further investigating the role of creative process information in amplifying consumer's perception of creativity in products.

This paper investigates the gate screening of ideas in engineering design, by examination of the validity of employee voting schemes and biases associated with such voting. After conducting an employee-driven innovation project at a major producer of disposable medical equipment, 99 ideas had to be screened for further development. Inspired by the concept of ‘wisdom of the crowd’, all ideas were individually rated by a broad selection of employees, and the ratings were used to investigate two biases in employee voting: visual complexity and endowment effect/ownership of ideas. The visual complexity bias was found to be a predictor for selection, but experienced employees were less affected by the bias. The ownership bias was potent in that every employee proved to be more likely to select his or her own ideas over other ideas, but this effect disappeared when aggregating across the crowd of employees. Furthermore, this study compared the employee selection with the preference of a small team of executives, showing that the employee voting significantly correlates with the preferences of the executives: overall, in the top 12 selected ideas and in the choice of idea categories. This match increases when including only the ratings of the most experienced employees.

This paper investigates the role of constraints in limiting and enhancing creativity in engineering design. Based on a review of literature relating constraints to creativity, the paper presents a longitudinal participatory study from Coloplast A/S, a major international producer of disposable medical equipment. At Coloplast, constraints played a fundamental role and the observations show the important, dual role of constraints in terms of being a limitation and a prerequisite for creativity. Too few or too many constraints had a negative impact on creativity, whereas the formulation, rationale and ownership of formal constraints played a crucial role in defining their influence on creativity – along with the tacit constraints held by the designers. The designers were found to be highly constraint focused, and four main creative strategies for constraint manipulation were observed: blackboxing, removal, introducing and revising. Constraints introduced late in a project contributed to the generation of new...

Despite existing enthusiasm and evidence for the effectiveness of innovative forms of educating and learning changing practices in educational systems is challenging as centuries old practices are ingrained in political and organizational structures that naturally resist change. This resistance to change is relevant to the topic of assessment within educational settings as methods for assessing student output through exams are still pre-dominant and innovative ways of assessing are rare. This chapter will focus on assessment of creativity and how it is applicable within an educational setting with an emphasis on assessing not only the student output but the creative process as a whole. The creative process is a phenomenon that every student goes through during his or hers education, whether it is identified as such or not. Significance should be attributed to efforts made by students throughout their creative processes rather than only focusing on their final output, as a creative process does not guarantee a creative output. Students and teachers alike can learn and benefit from considering the creative process, and an assessment method appropriate to fulfil the task of assessing the process will be introduced and its applicability portrayed.

This symposium responds to calls for an integration of in-vivo and in-vitro methods when studying how people tackle complex, open-ended issues in the areas of creativity, design, and innovation. Bringing together expertise from multiple perspectives and methodological backgrounds we explore fruitful ways towards integrative approaches to analyzing creative processes and practices. The theme is addressed from theoretical and practical viewpoints.

Participatory Design (PD) attracts great attention from designers working within healthcare, but also faces important challenges. In this paper we describe how the high complexity and heterogeneity in healthcare creates conceptual and pragmatic barriers for user participation. We study the notion of 'users' in traditional PD and argue that PD can benefit from exploring ways to segment users that goes beyond the existing approaches. We put forth the question 'can users in PD be involved in any other meaningful way, than as one group of representatives for the multiplicity of user needs?', and look to two other traditions, marketing and innovation studies, to explore how the understanding of segmentation in these traditions can contribute to the development of guidelines for user segmentation in PD. Guidelines not solely based on representativeness, but on skills, personal preferences and/or perceptions.