Creativity as a Design Criterion

One of the most important criteria for performance quality in both art and design seems to be the creativity of the product. Being original and innovative is by definition a feature of both areas. The primary objective of this study was to determine whether human judgment of creativity is a reliable and valid method in design evaluation and selection. In a first experiment, the judgments of experts, nonexperts, and people with an intermediate level of expertise were compared. They rated 44 first-year designs on creativity, prototypical value, attractiveness, interest, technical quality, expressiveness, and integrating capacity. Pearson product-moment correlations for creativity were relatively low, ranging from .23 to .29. There was little difference between experts and nonexperts. The results confirmed the research in artwork assessment. In Experiment 2 the results were replicated with senior design students as judges, a group with an intermediate level of expertise. Ratings were given for 3 different designs. Correlations were much higher, ranging from .48 to .57. This could be a consequence of the homogeneity of the group of judges. The prototypicality of a design, the distance between the design and the observers' internal representation, appeared to discriminate between creativity and other aesthetic criteria. A pair-comparisons analysis also contributed to the definition of creativity in both general and domain-specific terms.