Using Theoretical Ideas to Stimulate Creativity and Participation in Design

A science of design should be about the process of designing, including the methods, techniques and tools to support the design process. Understanding the relationship between creativity and the design process is the main goal of this paper. Towards that end I outline a method for interface design that is inspired by creative practices in furniture design. Creativity is defined as the act of finding an inspirational idea outside a design profession, which is then expressible with the materials of the profession. Social creativity transforms the idea into realization. Two interactive systems the author has been involved in designing (Janus, FLE Assistant) are analyzed using this approach from a socio-cultural perspective. The retrospective analysis revealed how theoretical ideas (reflection-in-action; generalized other) served as inspiration for the designs as well as provided affordances and constraints for software realization. The sub processes involved in transforming the ideas into user interface designs constitute the first steps of a design method for theory-informed collaborative design. Author