Unexpected Discoveries and S-invention of Design Requirements: a Key to Creative Designs

The creative outcome of a design process hinges on whether or not designers are able to find important aspects of a given problem and thereby invent design issues or requirements during the process. How do they do this? What becomes the impetus for the invention of important issues or requirements? Socalled "unexpected discoveries", the acts of attending to visuo-spatial features in sketches which were not intended when they were drawn, are believed to contribute to it. The purpose of the present research is to verify this hypothesis. Analysing the cognitive processes of a practising architect in a design session, we found that in about a half of his entire design process there was bi-directional causality between unexpected discoveries and the invention of issues or requirements; not only did unexpected discoveries become the driving force for invention, but also the occurrence of invention, in turn, tended to cause new unexpected discoveries. This has pedagogical implications.