| Description: |
International audience ; Creativity and innovation are fundamental for the progress of individuals and society, and recognised as the engine of sustainable and competitive economies. Thus, it is a challenge for companies and for designers and/or design teams to come up with products that are both new and adapted to future users. Designers or design teams have to be creative in order to imagine and conceive new products but it appears particularly complex (Bonnardel, 2012). From a cognitive point of view, a main characteristic of design activities is that designers' mental representations are initially incomplete and imprecise. Only by going through the problem-solving process itself can designers complete their mental representations. It is even more difficult in the context of prospective ergonomics, which is turned towards the creation of future products that have not been identified yet (Robert & Brangier, 2012), since designers have both to detect existing user needs, to anticipate future ones, and to inject creativity in the design solutions they propose. Moreover, in complex design situations, it is not only a single designer but a design team that has to perform creative activities. In these situations, the knowledge required for performing the design task is often distributed amongst different stakeholders who have different perspectives and backgrounds. For instance, design teams may consist of designers and specialists in ergonomics and, sometimes, end-users. However, the participation of this last kind of stakeholders is not always possible, due to pragmatic constraints (time, cost, availability of end-users, etc.). In addition, these collective activities may have positive effects on creative design activities, since people adopting different viewpoints or perspectives can propose new ideas, but also negative effects, such as production blocking due to an apprehension of evaluation or a social inhibition (Paulus & Nijstad, 2003). Therefore, our aim is to contribute to defining design ... |