The Design Society Chat Room: The interplay between design theory and creativity 

With Pascal Le Masson and Eswaran Subrahmanian

Tuesday 26th October 2021 @ 3pm BST (UK time)

Join us for the final DS Chatroom of 2021. We look forward to preparing more online events in summer 2022. 

The works of the researchers of the Design Theory SIG of the Design Society have contributed to great advances of design theory in the last years. In particular, design theory, as a model of creative thought, enables a renewed dialog with creativity research, leading to original research results and opening new research frontiers, particularly relevant in these times where multiple transitions in the unknown require designers that are both rigorous and creative. 

In the introduction to this chat, we will first remind of the historical (often underestimated) interplay between design theory and creativity and then discuss: 

  • How design theory advances in the last centuries appear as improvements in generativity with the goal to overcome fixations identified by creativity research.
  • How interactions between most advanced design theory and creativity research have enabled three original streams of research works in the last decade including: 
    • Design-theory based experiments to address critical questions in creativity research;
    • Theoretical models linking knowledge structures with generativity, to analyse creative thinking in knowledge intensive situations;
    • Uncovering generativity processes in new areas such as decision making in the unknown or computer algorithms.
  • The key drivers of this research and the emerging research topics (eg invention design, science design, transition design...) where interaction between design theory and creativity might lead to research breakthrough in the future.  

Learn more about the Design Theory SIG and the Design Theory Workshop and Tutorial which is scheduled for the 31st January - 4th February 2022. The call for both events is avalible as a download at the bottom of this page. 

Registration for the workshop and Tutorial is at: www.designtheory.sciencesconf.org/registration/index

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