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A Typology of Design Ideas

Research output: Contribution to book/anthology/report/proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Design ideas are commonly used as an indicator of success of design methods and processes. Yet it is very rarely defined what precisely constitutes "an idea", and how such an idea manifests itself to the researcher. This paper presents an examination of design idea definitions based on a thorough study of 75 research contributions. We construct a typology of seven definitions of design ideas. The purpose of the typology is to offer shared definitions and descriptions of design ideas to design and creativity researchers, aiding a higher degree of specificity when studying and analyzing the emergence of ideas in design processes.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationC and C 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition : Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition
Number of pages14
Place of publicationNew York, NY, USA
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Publication year2017
Pages393-406
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-4503-4403-6
Publication statusPublished - 2017

    Research areas

  • Creativity, Design ideas, Design processes, Design theory, Idea definition, Idea generation, Ideation

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