There are obstacles to creativity: one of them is called fixation effect, the fact that some knowledge about existing or obvious solutions is spontaneously activated and constrains the generation of new solutions. Converging evidence in cognitive psychology has indicated that the ability to generate original ideas can be limited by recently activated knowledge, such as examples of solutions. On the other hand, neuroimaging studies have recently demonstrated that exposure to examples could, on the contrary, have a stimulating effect on originality. To make sense of what seems to be contradictory studies, we hypothesized that two types of examples could have opposite effects on originality: (1) restrictive examples-within the fixation effect-could lead to a reduction in the originality of the solutions, whereas (2) expansive examples-outside the fixation effect-could provoke solutions of higher originality. Results from a total of 160 participants confirmed that the solutions proposed by the group exposed to restrictive examples were less original than those given by the group exposed to expansive examples.

Literature about public decision making experiences, including stakeholders' engagement, offers best practices but also reports of unsuccessful case studies. Meaningful participation activities require direct integration of stakeholders into all the phases of the public decision process to unleash innovation. Often, policy making incorporates participation late in the process, after the problem definition has occurred, alternatives have been defined, without considering stakeholders' knowledge and problem understanding. The early stage of policy alternatives design is essential to the development of policy. Our research presents an extensive literature review with respect to policy design and design theory in order to show that the formal process of generation of alternatives has been little investigated. There is a demand for methodologies aiming at supporting policy makers and relevant stakeholders during policy design. In this regard, this paper introduces (and explores) the operational role of design theory in the policy making process for the generation of policy alternatives. Design thinking, as a way to inform a collective problem definition leading to innovation, highlights the value of early stakeholders' engagement. The aim of this paper is to understand, from an operational point of view, what "design" means in a policy making context, developing an innovative approach for assisting the formalization of policy design. The paper uses the results of a pilot case study to illustrate the application of the Concepts-Knowledge theory framework to support the innovative design of policy alternatives for the groundwater protection policy of the Apulia Region (southern Italy). Response to Reviewers: Dear Editor, Many thanks for the opportunity granted to further improve the manuscript. We are thankful to the Reviewers for the appreciation of our revisions and we list below our answers to their last suggestions. The section numbers refer to the revised manuscript. The revised text has been highlighted.

C-K theory has been developed by Armand Hatchuel and Benoit Weil and then by other researchers since 1990s. In this paper we show that its very abstract nature and its high degree of universality actually supported a large variety of industrial applications. We distinguish three types of applications: 1) C-K theory provides a new language, that supports new analysis and descriptive capacity and new teachable individual models of thoughts; 2) C-K theory provides a very general framework to better characterize the validity domain and the performance conditions of existing methods, leading to potential improvement of these methods; 3) C-K theory is the conceptual model at the root of new design methods that are today largely used in the industry. To this end, we build on the work done by (Agogué and Kazakçi 2013). We gathered all the publications in blind peer-reviewed journals, as well as books, thesis, book chapters, conference papers with peer-reviews on abstracts and/or full papers and we analyzed the material regarding the four dimensions mentioned above. In this paper we don"t want to describe all this material but we shall favor some cases where we were directly involved and for which we are more competent. We completed our data collection with interviews and feedbacks from students and practitioners who applied C-K methodologies and tools.

The C-K theory is a recent theory of reasoning in design. It is based on the disctinction of the space C of concepts and the space K of knowledge. Design is defined then as the interaction of C and K spaces. Despite many practical applications, the theory has not been operationalised yet in the form of a computational design tool. In this paper, we argue that, in order to build such tools, a third space-an environment space E must be introduced to the theory. Using ideas and principles from situated cognition, we extend the C-K design theory by taking into account the environment E. We call this new version the C\K\E theory. As we discuss, this version provides a theoretical background for building personal design assistants-creative and adaptive design tools.

The goal of our research 1 was to understand what is expected today from a design theory and what types of impact such type of scientific proposition may reach. To answer these questions with a grounded approach we chosed to study the developement of C-K theory as phenomenon per se that can inform our research work. C-K theory is clearly recognized as a design theory and it is a good representative of the level of generality and abstraction of contemporary design theory. Indeed, the validity of the theory as such has already been documented (e.g.

Most empirical accounts of design suggest that designing is an activity where objects and representations are progressively constructed. Despite this fact, whether design is a constructive process or not is not a question directly addressed in current design research. By contrast, in other fields such as Mathematics or Psychology, the notion of constructivism is seen as a foundational issue. The present paper defends the point of view that forms of constructivism in design need to be identified and integrated as a foundational element in design research as well. In fact, a look at the literature reveals at least two types of constructive processes that are well embedded in design research. First, an interactive constructivism, where a designer engages a conversation with media, that allows changing the course of the activity as a result of this interaction. Second, a social constructivism, where designers need to handle communication and negotiation aspects, that allows integrating individuals' expertise into the global design process. A key feature lacking to these well-established paradigms is the explicit consideration of creativity as a central issue of design.To explore how creative and constructivist aspects of design can be taken into account conjointly, the present paper pursues a theoretical approach. We consider the roots of constructivism in mathematics, namely, the Intuitionist Mathematics, in order to shed light on the original insights that led to the development of a notion of constructivism. Intuitionists describe mathematics as the process of mental mathematical constructions realized by a creative subject over time. One of the most original features of Intuitionist Constructivism is the introduction of incomplete objects into the heart of mathematics by means of lawless sequences and free choices. This allows the possibility to formulate undecided propositions and the consideration of creative acts within a formal constructive process. We provide an in-depth analysis of Intuitionism from a design standpoint showing that the original notion is more than a pure constructivism where new objects are a mere bottom-up combination of already known objects. Rather, intuitionism describes an imaginative constructivist process that allows combining bottom-up and top-down processes and the expansion of both propositions and objects with free choices of a creative subject. We suggest that this new form of constructivism we identify is also relevant in interpreting conventional design processes and discuss its status with respect to other forms of constructivism in design. Keywords Centre de Gestion Scientifique, Design Chair, MINES PARISTECHAbstract: Most empirical accounts of design suggest that designing is an activity where objects and representations are progressively constructed. Despite this fact, whether design is a constructive process or not is not a question directly addressed in current design research. By contrast, in other fields such as Mathematics or Psychology, the notion of cons...

Purpose-Scholars and practitioners have both emphasized the importance of collaboration in innovation context. They have also largely acknowledged that the definition of common purpose is a major driver of successful collaboration, but surprisingly, researchers have put little effort into investigating the process whereby the partners define the common purpose. This research aims to explore the Generation of Common Purpose (GCP) in innovation partnerships. Design/methodology/approach-An action-research approach combined with modeling has been followed. Our research is based on an in-depth qualitative case study of a cross-industry exploratory partnership through which four partners, from very different arenas, aim to collectively define innovation projects based on micro-nanotechnologies. Based on a design reasoning framework, the mechanisms of GCP mechanism are depicted. Findings-Regarding GCP, two main interdependent facets are identified: (1) the determination of existing intersections between the parties' concept and knowledge spaces ('Matching'); (2) an introspective learning process that allows the parties to transforms those spaces ('Building'). Practical implications-The better understanding of the GCP and the specific notion of "C-K profiles", which is an original way to characterize each partner involved in a partnership, should improve the capabilities of organizations to efficiently define collaborative innovation projects. Originality/value-This article explores one of the cornerstones of successful collaboration in innovation: the process whereby several parties define the common purpose of their partnership.

Constructive machine learning aims at finding one or more instances of a domain which will exhibit some desired properties. Such a process bears a strong similarity with a design process where the ultimate objective is the generation of previously unknown and novel objects by using knowledge about known objects. The aim of the present work is to bring ideas from design theory to machine learning and elaborate an experimental procedure allowing the study of design through machine learning approaches. To this end, we propose an actionable definition of creativity as the generation of out-of-distribution novelty. We assess several metrics designed for evaluating the quality of generative models on this new task. Through extensive experiments on various types of generative models, we find architectures and hyperparameter combinations which lead to out-of-distribution novelty. Such generators can then be used to search a semantically richer and broader space than standard generative models would allow. * This paper is an adapted version of our submission to ICLR17, available here.30th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2016), Barcelona, Spain.