The Use of Creativity Methods in Design Process

Creativity is generally accepted as an important subject in the study of the design process. But few design processes are presented with the incorporation, notice or thought of the creative process. There are significant researches from the social sciences that recommend design research should embrace these processes in order to effectively adopt the tools, methods and techniques that have been developed around them. In this paper, the literature on design process and creativity in design will be reviewed briefly. The aim of this investigation is to explore possible methods that can support creativity in design and engineering design. It can be said that ideas that are created in design process have strong influence on final design products and these ideas are created mostly in two early stages of the process: Problem definition and conceptualization. Literature provides various methods and tools which can be used in the creative process. Some of these methods are used for Idea generation phase. So they can be used in early important stages of the engineering design process as an aid to increase creativity. These methods are presented in this paper.