Creativity in Transactional Design Problems: Non-intuitive Findings of an Expert Study Using Scamper

Designers are currently facing design problems that are not uniquely related to physical systems but transactional as well. Transactional processes (services) have had a steady growth during the last three decades and currently add more than 65% of global economic value. This study expands our understanding of designers’ interaction with ideation methods. We investigate a heuristic method known as SCAMPER, focusing on a transactional design problem with a relatively large transactional domain expert sample size (n=60). The study shows, unexpectedly, that the SCAMPER method appears to be both a fixating and de-fixating method (at least for the type of problem explored), where design fixation is not shown to be effectively mitigated by the method; yet, despite this finding, a significantly higher novelty production is achieved when compared to a non-assisted scenario.