Understanding design as a social creative process

The ‘Relay Ideation’ Technique: Moving from Problem Understanding to Problem Solving in the Design Process

“…Finally, co-creating a concept may result in a feeling of shared ownership and support for the concept by the whole design team, which may in return increase the team involvement and the likelihood of further research and development on the concept. This feeling of shared ownership might to a certain extent compensate for evaluation apprehension, one of the impeding social factors that has been linked to group brainstorms [1] that we mentioned in the introduction. As a result, criticism is less likely to be concentrated on a single person.…”

“…Furthermore, the fact that the team is split up into couples who have to pass on their work to the next team repeatedly, minimizes free riding, or the risk of any participant being lazy or relying on other team members too much. Working in small teams of two persons and (similar to the 'group passing technique' or the '6-3-5' method [5]) rotating the concept sheet creates a balance between the two opposing dynamics of restricting identification to avoid criticism and enabling identification to avoid the free riding effect suggested by Warr and O'Neill [1].…”

“…Various authors have tried to capture and understand the creative process in design and have identified several steps in this process (for an overview see [1]). The majority of authors have identified two phases that can be understood as 'problem understanding' and 'problem solving'.…”

“…An additional challenge in the process of ideation and finding solutions, is the fact that design teams often struggle with group effects that are counterproductive for idea generation [1]. Theoretically, problem solving with a team should result in more creative solutions compared to an individual approach.…”

“…But research has extensively shown that in practice the opposite is true. For instance, Warr and O'Neill [1] have identified three social influences on creativity that impede the theoretical benefits of group creativity: (a) production blocking, or the fact that verbally expressed ideas in a group allow only one person to express ideas at one time, while subsequently other team members may forget or suppress their ideas; (b) evaluation apprehension, or the fear of criticism of other team members; (c) free riding, or the phenomenon of group members becoming lazy and relying on other team members to contribute.…”