The Essential Tension of Creativity and Rationale in Software Design

Creativity and rationale connote two faces of design that are sometimes viewed as complementary: envisioning new worlds through intuitive strokes of innovation versus analyzing reasons and tradeoffs to guide the development of new artifacts and systems. Because it is frequently the case that different practitioners and researchers, and different design disciplines, prize one or the other more highly, there is not only a contrast, but also a lack of integration between creativity and rationale. Yet looking at the two, it also seems they are indivisible: What would be the point of building and/or using rationale in design if doing so were to result in anything other than greater creativity? And almost analogously, what good would be served by cultivating or purporting creativity that could never be interrogated, understood, or deliberately improved and applied, never be explained or conveyed to colleagues, never be passed on to students? On the other hand, this is most definitely not to say that the only reason for rationale in design is to enhance creativity, or that sources of creativity that cannot be explicitly articulated (put into words) have no value. Rather, it is to say that designers and design researchers should want rationales and rationale practices that enhance creativity, and should want to be able to understand and to explain their use of creativity to students, to clients, to users, and to other stakeholders. It is not hard to state how creativity and rationale could fail to have a mutually facilitative relationship. Rationale can easily become an obsession of documentation and formalization, excessively detailing issues, arguments, and alternatives to an extent or in a manner that no one would ever want to revisit, let alone create in the first place. And indeed, rationale practices are often cited as exemplifying a classic rationalist misunderstanding of what design is about and how it moves forward. Rationale practices that suffocate design by enforcing a tedious documentation burden could appropriately be regarded as undermining possibilities for creativity. But creativity has its challenges as well. It is sometimes characterized as necessarily arcane, inherently ineffable, and slightly (or even primarily) mystical. But this attitude unambitiously conflates the nuance and intellectual rigor required to pose and investigate subtle questions with reluctance to pose questions at all. It makes it a point of definition (or