Bo T. Christensen

Brian Moeran

Explores creativity and accompanying evaluative practices in a series of richly textured ethnographic case studies of creative industries.

Evaluative Practices in Innovation, Design, and the Arts

Exploring Creativity

Kim Halskov

Linden J. Ball

The scientific analysis of design thinking continues to burgeon and is of considerable interest to academic scholars and design practitioners across many disciplines. This research tradition has generated a growing corpus of studies concerning how designers think during the creation of innovative products, although less focus has been given to analysing how designers think when creating less tangible deliverables such as concepts and user-insights. Analysing Design Thinking: Studies of Cross-Cultural Co-Creation brings together 28 contributions from internationally-leading academics with a shared interest in design thinking who take a close look at professional designers working on a project that not only involves soft deliverables, but where a central role is played by co-creation across multiple, culturally diverse stakeholders. This collection of detailed, multi-method analyses gives a unique insight into how a Scandinavian design team tackled a specific design task within the automotive industry over a four-month design process. All papers draw upon a common, video-based dataset and report analyses that link together a diversity of academic disciplines including psychology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, architecture, management, engineering and design studies. The dataset affords multiple entry points into the analysis of design thinking, with the selected papers demonstrating the application of a wide range of analytic techniques that generate distinct yet complementary insights. Collectively these papers provide a coherent framework for analysing and interpreting design thinking ‘in vivo’ through video-based field studies.

Analysing Design Thinking: Studies of Cross-Cultural Co-Creation

Under the guidance of Moeran and Christensen, the authors in this volume examine evaluative practices in the creative industries by exploring the processes surrounding the conception, design, manufacture, appraisal and use of creative goods. They describe the editorial choices made by different participants in a 'creative world', as they go about conceiving, composing or designing, performing or making, selling and assessing a range of cultural products. The study draws upon ethnographically rich case studies from companies as varied as Bang and Olufsen, Hugo Boss and Lonely Planet, in order to reveal the broad range of factors guiding and inhibiting creative processes. Some of these constraints are material and technical; others are social or defined by aesthetic norms. The authors explore how these various constraints affect creative work, and how ultimately they contribute to the development of creativity.

Bo T. Christensen

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