Abstract
An emphasis on design thinking is increasingly prevalent in both professional and educational settings. From maker spaces to prototyping labs to the infusion of creative design thinking into K-12 instruction, principles of design thinking are making their way into a range of educational contexts and interventions. Many of these initiatives are based on creative thinking research and activities, making this research base relevant to the design of design-based educational interventions. In particular, the domain-specific and domain-general aspects of creativity have been studied and debated for decades, and a limited consensus has emerged on the extent to which creative thinking requires a mix of specific and general skills and personal characteristics. But little work has been done to explore the extent to which this previous theoretical and empirical work applies to creative design thinking, yet assumptions about the domain and task specificity of creative design thinking (or lack thereof) have a significant impact on both short- and long-term effects of design-based interventions. In this chapter, we review existing literature on creativity and domain specificity and then examine the degree to which that work is relevant to creative design thinking. Similarities and differences provide insight into design thinking in general and in creative contexts in particular. The chapter ends with an exploration of the implications of the research for teaching creative design thinking and which domain-general skills are particularly applicable.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
IDEO is an award-winning global design firm that takes a human-centered, design-based approach to helping organizations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow.
Read more at https://www.ideo.com/about/#Uprom8wIDu2xAQcd.99.
- 2.
References
Baer, J. (1993). Creativity and divergent thinking: A task-specific approach. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Baer, J. (1994). Why you shouldn’t trust creativity tests. Educational Leadership, 51, 80–83.
Barab, S. A., & Plucker, J. A. (2002). Smart people or smart contexts? Talent development in an age of situated approaches to learning and thinking. Educational Psychologist, 37, 165–182.
Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5–21.
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/.
Catmull, E., & Wallace, A. (2014). Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. London: Random House.
Churchman, C. W. (1967). Wicked problems [guest editorial]. Management Science, 14(4), B141–B142.
Churchman, C. W. (1974). Perspectives of the systems approach. Interfaces, 4(4), 6–11.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). Society, culture, and person: A systems view of creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The nature of creativity (pp. 325–339). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). The domains of creativity. In M. A. Runco & R. S. Albert (Eds.), Theories of creativity (pp. 190–214). London: Sage.
Dawson, C., & Gerken, L. (2009). From domain-generality to domain-sensitivity: 4-month-olds learn an abstract repetition rule in music that 7-month-olds do not. Cognition, 111, 378–382.
DeBono, E. (1970). Lateral thinking: Creativity step by step. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Ericsson, K. A. (Ed.). (1996). The road to excellence: The acquisition of expert performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Faste, R. (1981). Seeing it different ways: The role of perception in design [IDSA Papers Series]. McLean, VA: Industrial Designers Society of America.
Faste, R. (2001). The human challenge in engineering design. International Journal of Engineering Education, 17, 327–331.
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, H. (1988). Creative lives and creative works: A synthetic scientific approach. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The nature of creativity (pp. 298–324). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gardner, H. (1993). Creating minds. New York: Basic Books.
Gobble, M. M. (2014). Design thinking. Research Technology Management, 57(3), 59–61.
Kelley, T., & Littman, J. (2001). The art of innovation: Lessons in creativity from IDEO, America’s leading design firm. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Kirkham, N. Z., Slemmer, J. A., & Johnson, S. P. (2002). Visual statistical learning in infancy: Evidence for a domain general learning mechanism. Cognition, 83(2), B35–B42.
Koberg, D., & Bagnall, J. (1972). The universal traveler: A soft-systems guide to creativity, problem-solving, and the process of design. Los Altos (CA): Kaufmann.
Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (2000). States of excellence. American Psychologist, 55(1), 137–150.
National Research Council. (2015). Measuring human capabilities: An agenda for basic research on the assessment of individual and group performance potential for military accession. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, Committee on Measuring Human Capabilities: Performance Potential of Individuals and Collectives.
Osborne, A. (1963). Applied imagination: Principles and procedures of creative problem-solving (3rd ed.). New York: Scribner’s.
Plucker, J. A. (1998). Beware of simple conclusions: The case for content generality of creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 11, 179–182.
Plucker, J. A. (1999). Reanalyses of student responses to creativity checklists: Evidence of content generality. Journal of Creative Behavior, 33, 126–137.
Plucker, J. A. (2004). Generalization of creativity across domains: Examination of the method effect hypothesis. Journal of Creative Behavior, 38, 1–12.
Plucker, J. A. (2005). The (relatively) generalist view of creativity. In J. C. Kaufman & J. Baer (Eds.), Creativity across domains: Faces of the muse (pp. 307–312). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Plucker, J. A., & Beghetto, R. (2004). Why creativity is domain general, why it looks domain specific, and why the distinction does not matter. In R. J. Sternberg, E. L. Grigorenko, & J. L. Singer (Eds.), Creativity: From potential to realization (pp. 153–167). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Plucker, J. A., Beghetto, R. A., & Dow, G. (2004). Why isn’t creativity more important to educational psychologists? Potential, pitfalls, and future directions in creativity research. Educational Psychologist, 39, 83–96.
Plucker, J. A., & Dow, G. T. (2010). Attitude change as the precursor to creativity enhancement. In R. Beghetto & J. Kaufman (Eds.), Nurturing creativity in the classroom (pp. 362–379). New York: Cambridge.
Plucker, J. A., Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (2015). What we know about creativity [P 21 Research Series]. Washington, DC: Partnership for 21st Century Learning. Available at http://www.p21.org/our-work/4cs-research-series/creativity.
Plucker, J. A., Kennedy, C., & Dilley, A. (2015). What we know about collaboration [P 21 Research Series]. Washington, DC: Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Available at http://www.p21.org/our-work/4cs-research-series/collaboration.
Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4, 155–169.
Rittel, H. W. J. (1987). The reasoning of designers. Boston: Arbeitspapier Zum International Congress on Planning and Design Theory. Retrieved from http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~ellendo/rittel/rittel-reasoning.pdf.
Rowe, P. (1991). Design thinking. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Simonton, D. K. (2002). Intelligence and presidential greatness: Equation replication using updated IQ estimates. Advances in Psychology Research, 13, 143–153.
Sharif, M. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2016). The effect of relative encoding on memory-based judgments. Psychological Science, 27(8), 1136–1145.
Sternberg, R. J. (2005). The WICS model of giftedness. In R. J. Sternberg & J. E. Davidson (Eds.), Conceptions of giftedness (2nd ed., pp. 327–342). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tardif, T. Z., & Sternberg, R. J. (1988). What do we know about creativity? In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The nature of creativity (pp. 429–440). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Torrance, E. P. (1979). The search for satori creativity. Buffalo, NY: Creative Education Foundation Press.
Torrance, E. P., & Safter, H. T. (1999). Making the creative leap beyond. Hadley, MA: Creative Education Foundation Press.
Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Ward, T. B., & Kolomyts, Y. (2010). Cognition and creativity. In J. C. Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of creativity (pp. 93–112). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Weisberg, R. Q. (1993). Creativity: Beyond the myth of genius. New York: Freeman.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Worwood, M., Plucker, J.A. (2017). Domain Generality and Specificity in Creative Design Thinking. In: Darbellay, F., Moody, Z., Lubart, T. (eds) Creativity, Design Thinking and Interdisciplinarity. Creativity in the Twenty First Century. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7524-7_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7524-7_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-7523-0
Online ISBN: 978-981-10-7524-7
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)