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Change as little as possible: creativity in design by modification

Design research has often concentrated on creativity in the early phases of design or creativity in very open-ended design tasks, where creativity is assessed by how different a new design is from existing solutions. This paper argues, based on two case studies, that for incremental designs the creativity often lies in finding an innovative way of meeting new requirements with the minimal amount of change. This paper builds on the arguments in in Stacey, M, Eckert, C. (2010) ‘Reshaping the Box: Creative designing as constraint management’, International Journal of Product Development, 11(3/4), developing ideas that these engineering problems are frequently over-constrained and require creative reframing of the problem. However, the creative efforts of engineers are not recognised or dismissed as “problem solving”. This paper was published in a special issue on ‘Creativity in Engineering’ in the Journal of Engineering Design. The case studies in the paper address diesel engine design (through David Wyatt’s work on product architecture in the Cambridge EDC) and hospital refurbishment (through Pam Garthwaite’s work at the OU as part of the project ‘Design and Delivery of Robust Hospital Environments in a Changing Climate’ funded by the EPSRC grant EP/G061327/1). The paper is part of a systematic development of Comparative Design research which identifies similarities and differences between design processes in different domains. This research strand had its origins in Eckert’s project ‘Transferring successful design strategies’ funded by the Cambridge-MIT Institute (grant CMI/076/P-NCN). Generic characteristics of design processes are emerging from this research, especially the relation between types of constraints and engineering design creativity which is reported by Eckert and Stacey in their paper Constraints and conditions: drivers for design processes, in Chakrabarti A, and Blessing, L (eds) Models and Theories of Design: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations, 2014, Springer.