<aside> 🚩 This page summarizes a number of creativity methods that may lead to innovative embodiments.

</aside>

On This Page

Overview

We cannot force you to be creative.

The most we can do is help you learn methods that will, on average and in the long term, improve the odds of finding creative solutions to design problems.

Creativity in design is most important during the Propose stage of the Study, Propose, Critique loop. In particular, creativity in design is most important in ideating embodiments of functions. This will be our focus of creativity in this course.

Specific creativity methods have their own pages, and are listed below in the See Also section of this page.

However

A design is considered creative only in a given context. What you may think of as a creative solution may not be creative to someone else who has a different professional experience than you.

We are aware of this experiential shortcoming of students, but we simply cannot give you the practical experiences that can substitute for years of real-life work. However, we do know what we can expect students to have experienced. Thus, when we assess your application of creativity methods, we assess how well you executed the method, and not whether the result was “creative”.

A student that has applied a creativity method and developed a truly creative solution is considered to have gone far beyond the level of performance needed to “show mastery” in this topic.

Learning Objectives

A student who understands about creativity methods will:

be able to apply different methods to embody the same function in different ways;
select from a list of creativity methods those most appropriate for a given circumstance; and
concisely and precisely describe how the student applied a given method in a given case.