The Structure of Creative Design: What Problem Maps Can Tell Us about Problem Formulation and Creative Designers

Problem formulation is an important part of the design process that has been largely underexplored. Similarly, the relationship between how designers formulate problems and creative outcome is not well understood. To shed light on what the process of problem formulation can tell us about creativity in design, we use the problem map model – a flexible, domainindependent ontology for modeling the design formulation process – to analyze protocols from eight expert designers. In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness of using problem maps for coding design protocols and what the problem map model can tell us about the protocols of designers. In this exploratory study, we use the problem map model to code and analyze the problem formulation stage of the design process. INTRODUCTION The ill structured nature of design problems [1] makes problem formulation a crucial element of design worth studying. Problem formulation lets the designer define the problem space and affects how the solution space will be explored. There is no unique formulation of design problems – each designer creates his or her own based on his/her background, experience and understanding of the problem. Furthermore, the design process is not linear; problem formulation co-evolves with the solution [2]. While there has been considerable research on the design process, little research has been conducted to understand the design space or how the designer constructs the problem space to begin with. Additionally, how a designer constructs and defines the problem space may have strong implications for the creativity of the design itself. In this exploratory study, we aim to understand the problem formulation stage of the design process using the problem map ontology. We also investigate whether using the problem map ontology [3] -a flexible, domain-independent ontology for modeling the design formulation process -to encode and analyze protocol data can provide us with information about the designer’s creativity levels and the process by which different designers approach problem formulation. While protocol studies have been conducted on engineering design [4-6], few have used a pre-defined analysis method. One exception is the study conducted by Pourmohamadi and Gero [7]. Instead, most studies let their categories emerge during the coding and analysis process [8,9]. In this paper, we claim that the problem map framework can be used as a predefined method of encoding existing protocol data. Additionally, we show how the problem map framework can be used to analyze the data and how we can further attempt to