A Study on Creativity in Comparison with Linguistic Interpretation Process

We investigated the process of design creativity by examining the characteristics of thinking during design activity involving concept synthesis. In our experiments, subjects were asked to perform two tasks to interpret novel noun-noun combinations and to create a design based on novel noun-noun combinations. We analyzed and compared the thinking used in each task using a method reported in cognitive linguistics literature, which assigns the interpretation of novel noun-noun combinations to one of three types: concept abstraction, blending, and thematic relation. We classified the design processes used by our subjects to create design concepts according to these three types and evaluated the creativity of the designs along two dimensions, practicality and originality. Our results showed a significant difference in the amount of blending involved in interpretation and design creation. The proportion of blending during the design task was higher than that during interpretation, and the creativity of design results produced using blending was higher than that based on other types. Since concept blending is an effective way of creating a new idea, we suggest that blending is an important characteristic of the process of creativity.