Gesture, Creativity and Design

DS 86: Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Design Creativity,Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

Year: 2016
Editor: Julie Linsey, Maria Yang, and Yukari Nagai
Author: Beck, Davis
Series: ICDC
ISBN: 978-1-904670-82-7

Abstract

This paper forms part of a larger research study that investigates how designers
collaborate and respond to design criteria. Specifically, this paper will document the role of
gesture during early stage design activity by detailing the types of gesticulations that occur
between designers during the early, fuzzy front-end of design. This includes coding and
analysing relevant metaphoric, deictic, iconic, functional and mechanistic gestures. The findings
from this research indicate that designers use gesture as an extension to unarticulated elements in
the design process. Furthermore, design teams discuss meta-narrative aspects of the discourse
structure when working through design concepts. As a result, designers rely on metaphoric
gesticulations to help communicate solution-scenarios. Future research to better define the
relationship between gesture type and design activity will provide additional rich understandings
of the role of gesture in design as a creative, collaborative and communicative design tool.

Keywords: gesture, creativity, design process