Connecting creative product design processes to creative product design outcomes: A scoping review

Abstract

Generating repeatable guidelines for designing creative products has long been an aim of the design research community. Even so, a widely trusted or agreed-upon process has not yet emerged. As a first step toward this goal, it is important to take stock of the reported connections between creative design processes and creative design outcomes. Thus, we conducted a scoping review focusing on creative product design. Our search identified 130 papers published from 1969 to 2021. The most fre-quent study type was a proposal paper (n = 53). Twenty-seven of the included papers used experimental methods. When connecting the creative design process to the out-come, 72 papers theorized about how the targeted design process could influence design outcome creativity; 58 papers used empirical methods to assess outcome creativ-ity. These findings suggest that more empirical studies are needed to examine the pro-cess-to-outcome association in creative product design.