CONTROLLED DISORDER:
MENTAL IMAGERY AND EXTERNAL REPRESENTATION IN THE CREATIVE DESIGN PROCESS

Mental imagery and external representation play significant roles among stages of creative process. Within imagery, remembered and imaginary imagery are two components involving experience and combinations of remembered images. Representation, on the other hand, takes on many forms, such as drawing, scribbling, taking notes, as a consequence of an imagery period. These two means provide valuable insight into the mystery of the creative design process that has been known to be a chaotic and unstructured one. It has also been seen as a syndrome, or a black box that miraculously produces original results. However, leaving the subject as a mystery prevents its utilization. Aiming to investigate creativity in the educational and business context, a holistic course has been adopted and attention has been drawn to the importance of superimposing and verifying results by utilizing various techniques. Disorder is key for creative outcomes, but it cannot answer problems in a useful way if it is not guided. The dual relationship in which one accidental and one deliberate process exists within a single creative process, has taken on several names, such as, unstructured-structured, divergent-convergent, or vertical-lateral. This type of controlled disorder exists within the five stages of a creative process -Readiness, Reception, Reflection, Revelation, Recreation (5R’s)- of the Sensational Thinking model of O’Neill and Shallcross. Within these stages, user-identification is a beneficial method that can aid in producing creative results that fulfill users’ needs. In design studios, students are eager to focus on their own design expressions at the expense of the users’ needs. However, with a deliberate user-identification stage within the creative process, both can be accomplished. This investigation dwells mainly upon the methodology to tackle the difficult and at times disorderly topic of creativity that can be reached through a thorough understanding of the creative process for means of flourishing it within designers’ environments. The goal is to explore how the framework of the 4P’s (person, process, product, press or environment) necessary to define creativity wholly can be used to look at the creative “process” within which the creative “person” creates a creative “product” in a creative “press, context, or environment”. Thus, a selection of interconnected studies that dwell on the role of imagery and externalization within the stages of the creative process, operationalizing and assessing creativity in design, and connections with the social and physical environments which it takes place in will be discussed.

Keywords: creativity, creative design process, mental imagery, external representation