To create means to “bring into existence.”

• Thesaurus entries include: “produce, generate, bring into being, make, fabricate, fashion, build, construct; design, devise, originate, frame, develop, shape, form, forge.”

Creativity is defined as “the use of the imagination or original ideas, esp. in the production of an artistic work.”

• The dictionary
  • describes this term as applying to persons with “active, exploratory minds.”
  • includes a distinction between
    • the inventive mind that “comes up with solutions to problems it has posed for itself” and
    • the resourceful mind that “deals successfully with externally imposed problems or limitations.”
    • An ingenious mind is one that is both inventive and resourceful.
• Thesaurus entries for creativity include: “inventiveness, imagination, innovation, innovativeness, originality, individuality.”

One does not design things that one knows already exists.

• Although there are designs that are only marginally new, there is at least something new in every design.
  • Exceptions to this include cases where the design is not the important artifact - for example, in teaching design.
• Generally: designing involves generating ideas cognitively that one would not have generated otherwise.
  • One may say, then, that designers create “from nothing,” as it were.

This creativity is usually marked as essential characteristic of design.

• Dym [Dym94] recognizes three classes of designing: creative, variant, and routine.
• These map very well to the inventiveness/resourcefulness spectrum noted in the definitions above.
• Design activities thus cover the whole spectrum of creative requirements.

Moreover, design creativity is distinct from artistic creativity by having to address the needs of others.

• Purely artistic creation is a self expression – an expression of the artist's self – even if the act is motivated by external forces or experiences.
  • The artist interprets things, depicting what he himself “sees,” and then renders that for others to “see.”
  • For example, the author William Gibson once advised Salustri to “write only if it hurts not to.”
• A designer must find an expression common to many people, driven in large part by what the others “see.”
  • A designer must render something that captures the visions of others
    • while imbuing their designs with their own sensibilities.

This outward-looking sense of designerly activity seems similar Donald Norman's notion of design affordance [Nor88].

• i.e. an object suggests its own uses to a human, mitigated by the human's experience.
• The designer needs to understand the affordances of a target user community, and create with respect to those affordances.

In this case, the boundary layer between designing and creativity involves the degree to which the creator expresses the vision – the affordances – of others.

• In designing, others matter more than the designer does; in art, they matter less.