The Pagoda Design Space: Extending the Scope of Design - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 68

Unless the design effort stops at this phase (for example, if there is no budget for its
execution), the design is then materialized and put to use. We do not distinguish
here between different categories of design products, such as completely new ones,
redesigns, or variants of the same prototype.
5.4.5 Tier 5: Post-design—Lessons Learned
Section 5.2 emphasized the importance of the post-design phase, in which new
knowledge is derived based on feedback from the use of the designed artifact. In
addition to such feedback, which is practical for the most part, new theoretical
knowledge may emerge if the design of the entity refers designers to new territories.
A new building type may be defined (for example, a few decades ago a community
center was a new notion), or a product within a known category is transformed with
new properties that surpass what was hitherto known (for instance the first folding
bicycles). In extreme cases, novel designs may bring about paradigm shifts and new
norms, and they certainly may have an impact on the development and use of new
technologies, as well as on regulations and laws.
5.4.6 Central Axis: Insight to Impact
We have looked at the five tiers of the design space; it may be appropriate to claim
that they represent design expertise. Each of these tiers is an entity of its own, but
they interact and rest on each other in many flexible ways. However, in addition to
expertise creativity is also a hallmark of design almost by definition: every designed
entity is new, at least in some respects. Can a designer (or team) come up with a
design that does not only fulfill its purpose but is also considerably novel, based on
expertise alone? Some say that this is possible, and a host of training programs and
techniques aimed at enhancing creativity have been suggested (e.g., Higgins 1994 ;
VanGundy 1988 ) , many of which, like Triz and brainstorming, are not unique to
design (for an insightful overview, see Smith 1998 ). Others are critical of 'creativity
techniques' and claim that if at all used, they are but incarnations of design methods
(e.g., Laakso and Liikkanen 2012 ). As such, creativity methods pertain to the
expertise portion of the design space, in one or more of the bottom tiers.
In this paper we associate creativity not with any component of expertise, but
with the axis of insight-impact. Insight is not divorced from knowledge, but it does
not emanate from it directly. An insight may be a vision concerning the design
solution, but it may also pertain to the users, or to the kind of search that should be
undertaken. It requires no explicit rationale and is not predictable in advance; it is
sudden and may surprise even the designer him or herself. Insights are closely
related to intuition and imagination: “Working together intuition, (recognition), and
imagination give rise to insight, the quintessential phenomenon of breakthrough