JED Special Issue on Design Creativity (Jan 2012)

Guest Editors:
Yukari Nagai, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
John Gero, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, USA

Designers are change agents in a society. They are one of the groups that add value in botheconomic and in human terms. Design research focuses on understanding designing as a process. Much design research aims to understand routine designing in order to build tools that aid the designer primarily by improving their efficiency. As our understanding of routine designing increases, the topic of creativity in designing attracts increasing interest as a means of widening the scope of our understanding of designing and as a basis for the development of tools thataugment the designer. In order to elucidate the nature of engineering design, issues related to thecognitive processes underlying design creativity are being studied as are computational models of design creativity. Research into designing processes is starting to view designing as a social aswell as a technical process and that the products of designing involve human and social dimensions.

Design creativity is now discussed at every important conference in the field of design, includingthe International Conference on Engineering Design. Earlier, “creativity” was considered to be aknown but undefined term in engineering design and was related to “original design,” and many studies that related design cognition to creative design knowledge were presented at ICED03 (Stockholm) and ICED05 (Melbourne). Since 2007, innovation and creativity (innovative design and creativity in design) were one of the main issues dealt with at many design conferences (ICED07, ICED09, DESIGN2010, DCC10). Design creativity then became a keyword for theseforums. The International Conference on Computational and Cognitive Models of Creative Design has been running since 1989 indicating the longstanding interest in creativity in the design research community. Studies of design creativity have gained increased importance indesign conferences, and discussions on creativity have become important in all fields of design research, including engineering design.

An indication of the increased interest in design creativity is the new special interest group of theDesign Society on Design Creativity that was launched in 2007. The goal of this Special Interest Group is to provide a forum to discuss the nature and potential of design creativity from theoretical and methodological viewpoints.

The Journal of Engineering Design intends to publish a special issue on design creativity. You are invited to submit original papers related to design creativity including but not limited to the general themes of:

• Creative design processes
• Design cognition and creativity
• Design computing and creativity
• Educating for design creativity
• Methods for design creativity

Publication Schedule

Notification of intention to submit: 10 December, 2010 (email either of the guest editors)
Full papers due for review: 25 February, 2011
Notification of review decision: 27 May, 2011
Revised manuscript submission: 29 July, 2011
Final decision: 16 September, 2011
Final manuscripts: 21 October, 2011
Expected date of publication: January, 2012 (Vol. 23, No. 2)

Submission Instructions

Please prepare your paper following the “Instructions for Authors” available from the Journal of Engineering Design website (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tf/09544828.html).
Please submit your paper directly to the journal at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cjen.