Designer’s and User’s Creativity - Processes, Goals, Limits
Designer’s and user’s creativity - processes, goals, limits
An Interview with Virginia Hechtel
How exactly does creativity occur? Where does this phantom creature often covered by an allure of mysticism come from, and what exotic conditions will help it thrive in captivity? We will try to outline the situation and to give a framework to this widely discussed topic on which many people already have exposed their positions, interviewing and posing some key questions to the Italian-German designer Virginia Hechtel attending a two years master’s program in Product Service System Design at Politecnico di Milano.
If you had to give a working definition of creativity, how would you define it?
To start this conversation I’d like first of all to introduce a statement made by Bruno Munari in 1992 which is “When somebody says: I could do this as well , it means that he can redo it, otherwise he would have already done it”. Actually I really think that creativity is not just a characteristic or a property but a real state of mind, an attitude, a way of living. In the book ‘Fantasia’, 1977, Munari gives a very technical definition of creativity. He says that“creativity is a finalised use of fantasy, or rather of fantasy and invention, in a global way. Creativity applied in the field of design, considering design as a way to plan and to project, is a practise that, even being free as the fantasy and precise as the invention, includes all the aspects of a problem, not only imagination as fantasy and function as invention do, but also the psychological, social, economic and human aspect.” Munari here strongly differentiates between creativity, fantasy and invention, also if in my opinion these three terms are very tied to each other. An other definition provided by Robert Sternberg tells that creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel and appropriate. So to answer I think that on one hand creativity is not just a definition to be referred to the field
An Interview with Virginia Hechtel
How exactly does creativity occur? Where does this phantom creature often covered by an allure of mysticism come from, and what exotic conditions will help it thrive in captivity? We will try to outline the situation and to give a framework to this widely discussed topic on which many people already have exposed their positions, interviewing and posing some key questions to the Italian-German designer Virginia Hechtel attending a two years master’s program in Product Service System Design at Politecnico di Milano.
If you had to give a working definition of creativity, how would you define it?
To start this conversation I’d like first of all to introduce a statement made by Bruno Munari in 1992 which is “When somebody says: I could do this as well , it means that he can redo it, otherwise he would have already done it”. Actually I really think that creativity is not just a characteristic or a property but a real state of mind, an attitude, a way of living. In the book ‘Fantasia’, 1977, Munari gives a very technical definition of creativity. He says that“creativity is a finalised use of fantasy, or rather of fantasy and invention, in a global way. Creativity applied in the field of design, considering design as a way to plan and to project, is a practise that, even being free as the fantasy and precise as the invention, includes all the aspects of a problem, not only imagination as fantasy and function as invention do, but also the psychological, social, economic and human aspect.” Munari here strongly differentiates between creativity, fantasy and invention, also if in my opinion these three terms are very tied to each other. An other definition provided by Robert Sternberg tells that creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel and appropriate. So to answer I think that on one hand creativity is not just a definition to be referred to the field