Poetic design: an exploration of the parallels between expert poetry composition and innovative design practice

Despite parallels between the structure of poetry composition tasks and design tasks, there appears to be no previous research exploring the consequences of these correspondences for an understanding of skilled behaviour in these two domains. In the present study we interviewed five expert poets about their creative practices and conducted a thematic analysis comparing these practices to key findings concerning the nature of design expertise. Our discussion focuses on three behavioural equivalences that appear to be associated with poetry composition and innovative design: (1) the role of “sources of inspiration” [15] in contextualizing activity and in informing the creation of novel solution ideas; (2) the involvement of “primary generators” [13] in scoping tasks in terms of core objectives; and (3) the fluid and flexible nature of problem and solution representations, as captured by the notion that problem and solution spaces “co-evolve” [14].