Hotspots and Trends in Creativity and Design Research: A Knowledge Graph Analysis

Abstract

Design creativity is the process or result of extending, presenting and interpreting creative ideas and concepts in a design way, the role of design creativity in corporate creativity activities has drawn increasing attention from the academic community. However, limited research has tried to holistically summarize the research trends and hotspots in the context of creativity and design. Through knowledge graph analysis, this paper analyzed the academic literature from Web of Science and visualized the knowledge domain in creativity and design research from 2010 to 2019. It has been found that the number of creativity-related design papers is increasing rapidly with a total of 498 papers. The top 15 co-occurring keywords include “design creativity”, “innovation”, “design making”, “engineering design”, “design education”, “divergent thinking”, “representation”, “student”, “knowledge”, “aesthetics”, “design process”, “perception”, “product design”, “fixation” and “quality”. The research that focuses on this topic could be summarized into eleven clusters namely industrial design, disability, design activity, explanatory design, design education, assessment, users, design fixation, design theoretic, TRIZ, and art education.