Mental synthesis and creativity in

design: an experimental examination

Vasilije Kokotovich, Industrial Design Program, Faculty of Design,
Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney, P.O. Box
123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia
Terry Purcell, Department of Architectural and Design Science, Building
G04, Sydney University 2006, Sydney, Australia

This research examined design issues of creativity, mental synthesis, and

drawing by conducting two experiments. These experiments compared
and contrasted 3D designers, 2D designers, and Non-designers. The first
experiment investigated if designers were more creative than non-
designers when given creative mental synthesis tasks. We found they
were. The second experiment investigated the relationship between
drawing and creative mental synthesis. We found that how and when
drawing is used is important. This has implications for design in that
drawing and design representation appear to play a central role in the
design thinking process.  2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Keywords: mental synthesis, creativity, drawing, design research, design

cognition

1 Lawson, B How Designers

Think The Architectural Press,
London (1980)
2 Tovey, M ‘Drawing and CAD
in industrial design’ Design Stud-
ies Vol 10 No 1 (1989) pp 24–39
3 Hertz, K ‘A coherent descrip-
tion of the process of design’
Design Studies Vol 13 No 4
(1992) pp 393–410
4 Ferguson, E Engineering and
the Mind’s Eye MIT Press, Cam-
bridge, MA (1993)
5 Smith, G F and Browne, G J
‘Conceptual foundations
design problem solving’ IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man,
and Cybernetics Vol 23 No 5
(1993) pp 1209–1218
6 Goldschmidt, G ‘On visual
design thinking: the viz kids of
architecture’ Design Studies Vol
15 No 2 (1994) pp 158–174
7 Cunningham, C ‘Bicycle
wheels, salad bowls, and cricket
balls: teaching visualisation skills
T
wo broad themes occur in the literature concerned with the design
process, whether the authors are writing about problems with plan-
ning students or the thought processes of architects, industrial
designers, or engineers1–7. The first is that design is essentially a process
of creative mental synthesis. The second is that drawing plays a central
role in the design process.
For example when writing about design thinking Lawson1 in one of the
of
central texts in the field, states that: ‘Design involves a highly organized
mental process capable of manipulating many kinds of information, blend-
ing them all into a coherent set of ideas and finally generating some realiz-
ation of those ideas’ (p 6). Lawson here is clearly seeing design as a mental
process involving synthesis. This statement is however somewhat vague.
It can be interpreted as manipulating and synthesising abstract ideas, con-
cepts, or knowledge to create a design proposal, as manipulating and syn-
thesising forms to create a new form, or both. In addition, Lawson regards
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 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain
 these acts of mentally synthesising ideas and forms as being strongly asso-
ciated with creativity. In his subsequent book8 based on interviews with
noted architects, Lawson also documents the belief in the central role of
sketching and drawing in the design process in general and in creative
design in particular. However in common with much of the other literature
in the field Lawson’s work is essentially anecdotal, that is it is based on
designer’s thinking and speculating about the design process on the basis
of their own experiences. There are exceptions, for example, Goldschmidt6
and Schon and Wiggins9 draw similar conclusions based on the analyses
of protocols of actual design sessions. However these authors’ work are
small in number relative to the total amount written about the design pro-
cess based on personal experience.

The aim of the research to be reported was to develop an empirical

approach that would allow a more rigorous examination of these beliefs
about the role of mental synthesis and drawing in the design process and
in creativity in design. While Lawson’s own work is largely anecdotal, he
also points the way towards a possible area where appropriate empirical
methods may be found: ‘Of all the questions we can ask about design, the
matter of what goes on inside the designer’s head is by far the most difficult
and yet the most interesting and vital. This leads inevitably into the realm
of cognitive psychology, the study of problem solving and creativity, in
short thought itself’1 (p 94).

1 Mental imagery: the cognitive perspective

to planning students’ Australian For the past 30 years issues related to the reality and functions of mental
Planner Vol 32 No 4 (1995)
pp 237–241 imagery have been the focus of considerable debate and research in cogni-
8 Lawson, B How Designers
Think: The Design Process tive psychology. Because of this intense interest a number of empirical
Demystified Butterworth Archi- methods have been developed to examine the various issues at the core of
tecture, Kent (1990)
9 Schon, D A and Wiggins, G the debate.
‘Kinds of seeing and their func-
tions in designing’ Design Stud-
ies Vol 13 No 2 (1992) pp 135– However, this paper will focus on a methodology which explored creative
156
10 Thompson, A and Klatzky, aspects of mental synthesis. Recognising the previous literature in mental10
R L ‘Study of visual synthesis:
required only recognition skills, that is matching to a previously seen shape
integration of fragments into
forms’ Journal of Experimental or combining shapes to see if they match a predetermined form, Finke and
Psychology: Human Perception
and Performance Vol 4 No 2 Slayton11 and Finke 12 sought to investigate what they termed creative
(1978) pp 244–263 mental synthesis. What set their work apart from previous research in men-
11 Finke, R A and Slayton, K
‘Explorations of creative visual tal synthesis was the core idea of visual ‘discoveries’ in imagery. They
synthesis in mental imagery’
Memory and Cognition Vol 16 No
claim that the nature of previous work restricted the subjects’ abilities to
3 (1988) pp 252–257 make ‘creative discoveries’ in the imagined mental synthesis.
12 Finke, R A Creative Ima-
gery: Discovery and Inventions
in Visualisation Lawrence Essentially in the task they developed the subjects were shown drawings
Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale,
NJ (1990) of 15, basic two dimensional (2D) forms, for example a circle, a square,

438 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000

 the letter J, a triangle, the letter L. From this set three forms were randomly
selected and named for the subjects. As soon as the parts were named the
subjects were to close their eyes and attempt to mentally create a recogniz-
able form. At the end of two minutes they were to open their eyes and
write down the name of the figure and then draw it. Figure 1 below contains
an example of a possible 2D mental synthesis response. This output is
clearly the result of a mental synthesis process, an activity thought to occur
in the design process.

In his later work Finke12 sought to advance the research in creative mental
synthesis by investigating three-dimensional (3D) mental synthesis. He felt
the flat two-dimensional forms to be of little practical value to three-dimen-
sional thinkers such as engineers or inventors. With respect to 3D mental
synthesis basically a similar procedure to that of the 2D research was fol-
lowed. The subjects were given three basic forms randomly selected from
a larger group of drawings representing three-dimensional forms which
they were asked to memorize (e.g. sphere, cone, rectangular block, hook)
and an invention category (e.g. Toys and Games—Furniture—Appliances
etc.…). The subjects had to close their eyes and were given a short time
to mentally assemble the parts to make some kind of useful object. At the
end of the time period they were instructed to open their eyes and write
down the name of the practical object, then draw it and then describe it.

Finke and Slayton11 measured the mental synthesis aspect of the task by
having judges make numerical ratings of the correspondence between the
description of the object and the drawing of the object. Finke12 used a
similar measure for the 3D version of the task. The creativity of the synthe-
sized object was measured in the same way by having judges rate the
creativity of the objects produced. We would argue that the task developed
by Finke and Slayton11 and Finke12 provides a possible model for
investigating the beliefs in the design literature about both the role of men-
tal synthesis in design and the creativity of the results of such mental

Figure 1 2D creative men-

tal synthesis example (after
Finke and Slayton11)

Mental synthesis and creativity in design: an experimental examination 439


13 Anderson, R E and
Helstrup, T ‘Multiple perspec-
tives on discovery and creativity
in mind and on paper’ in
Roskos-Ewoldsen, M J Intons-
Peterson and R E Anderson
(eds) Imagery, Creativity, and
Discovery: A Cognitive Perspec-
tive Elsevier Science, Amster-
dam, Netherlands (1993) pp
223–253
440
activities. The task clearly involves mental synthesis as participants are
asked to close their eyes and perform the task using ‘mental imagery’. The
measures associated with the task then allow an assessment of the success
of this synthesis and the extent to which the results are creative. Given the
basic belief in the design literature that it involves mental synthesis and
creativity, the most simple and direct test of this idea using the creative
mental synthesis task would be to compare the performance of designers
and non-designers on the tasks. If mental synthesis is one of the core
aspects of the design process then designers should both be better at syn-
thesis and produce more creative output than non-designers. The first
experiment to be reported explores this straightforward hypothesis. In this
study measures of correspondence/creativity (2D) and
practicality/creativity (3D) were obtained, however, this paper will focus
on the creativity results.
While the mental synthesis task can be used in this way, it is possible to
extend the task to also investigate whether or not drawing can influence
the synthesis or creativity aspects of the task. While their interest was not
on the role that drawing is thought to play in design, Anderson and
Helstrup13 had investigated whether allowing subjects to doodle and draw
while they were performing the task affected performance. They argued
that developing an object by performing this task mentally might involve
a high cognitive load and that drawing while thinking and developing a
solution may lighten the cognitive load on the subject by externalizing the
form being worked with. In order to test the importance of drawing in
creative mental synthesis they conducted experiments modeled after Finke
and Slayton11. In their procedure subjects, while developing their forms,
were sometimes encouraged to draw to develop their forms, and other times
they were instructed to develop the forms only mentally. They found no
difference between using only internal visual imagery and using external
visual imagery (that is drawing with pencil and paper) as support for gener-
ating patterns of good correspondence. Further there was no difference in
the number of creative patterns generated either using pencil and paper
support to develop the forms or only mentally developing the forms.
This, according to the authors, was a surprising result. Both the exper-
imenters and the subjects held the belief that using pencil and paper to
help construct patterns should be easier or more effective than using mental
imagery alone. These results would also appear to bring into question the
views expressed in the design literature with respect to drawing as an aid
in creative mental synthesis. However, there are a number of reasons why
these results should be treated with caution. It is often noted in the design
literature that people have to be taught how to draw. The participants in
Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000
 these experiments were university students drawn from the general univer-
sity population. Consequently they may not have known how to draw in
a way that assists in mental synthesis and creativity. Similarly they were
simply instructed to draw while they carried out the task. It could be that
drawing is only of use at particular points in the process, for example when
the drawing activity follows mental synthesis. However, the structure of
the creative mental synthesis task allows a much more careful analysis
of drawing by allowing quite explicit manipulation of when the drawing
activity occurs.

The second experiment to be reported investigates the issue of the role of

drawing by systematically controlling when the drawing activity occurs
and by comparing the performance of designers with non-designers.

2 Experiment 1
2.1 Experimental design
In the preceding discussion of the creative mental synthesis task it was
argued that the most straightforward way of assessing the relevance of this
task to the issues of mental synthesis and creativity in design was by com-
paring the performance of designers and non-designers. However the nature
of the material in the 2D and 3D versions of the task suggested a refinement
of this basic approach. One version of the task involves drawings of simple
2D forms. Such forms can be viewed as the typical forms that would be
used by graphic designers. Similarly the forms (thought to be more
complex) in the 3D version of the task are representations of the types of
objects used by industrial designers. A development of the basic hypothesis
therefore is that there should be differential performance on the two ver-
sions of the task between graphic designers and industrial designers.
Graphic designers should perform better, on the measures of creativity,
using the 2D forms than the industrial designers while the reverse should
occur with the 3D version of the task. Both types of designers would how-
ever be expected to perform better than the non-designers. The first aspect
of the experimental design of the first experiment therefore is the use of
the two versions of the task with separate groups of industrial and graphic
designers and non-designers. We also however did not simply use anybody
who was not a designer as the basis for our non-design group. Rather we
sought to identify a group who would contrast with the designers in terms
of the types of thought processes involved in their activities. If design
involves the manipulation of representations of physical objects then the
most appropriate comparison group would be those whose thinking pro-
cesses are based on words and abstract concepts. A number of academic
disciplines could be placed in this category however we chose the disci-
pline of the law as the basis for our comparison group.

Mental synthesis and creativity in design: an experimental examination 441

 Using undergraduate students in the final stages of their course work, we
divided 120 subjects and 30 judges into two cohorts. One cohort of subjects
worked on 2D problems (as in Finke and Slayton11), and the second cohort
worked on 3D problems (as in Finke12). Within each cohort, each of the
discipline types had twenty participants and five judges represented, total-
ing 60 subjects and 15 judges. Both cohorts of subjects (2D and 3D),
completed eight three-minute trials. Within each trial, in order to maximize
the creative output, they could create as many forms as they liked before
the end of the time period. Once they had an idea they were to open their
eyes and write down the name of the figure or describe it, get a new piece
of paper, then close their eyes again to develop another form. They were
to keep their eyes closed until they had developed a form. After the time
period ended, they were to go back and draw what they envisaged. Once
they started to draw, they could not change anything they wrote in naming
the form. This was to insure they did not discover patterns in their drawings
(no emergence or reinterpretation was allowed).

2.2 Results and discussion of experiment 1

The results of the experiment are presented as the frequency of creative
responses as a function of the type of problem (involving 2D or 3D forms)
and participant group (industrial designers, visual communication or
graphic designers and non-designers). The frequencies were analysed using
log-linear procedures; however the simple frequency table illustrates the
patterns of significance (Table 1). First the row totals reveal that, as pre-
dicted, the designers produce almost twice the number of creative forms
than the non-designers. However the apparent similarity between the totals
for the designers masks a critical difference which is apparent when the
type of problem is taken into account. As we predicted the visual communi-
cation or graphic designers produced more creative forms when they were
using the 2D problems than the industrial designers and the reverse was
the case for the 3D problems. This result appears to indicate that design
abilities may be in part tied to familiarity with a set of forms that are
characteristic of the discipline concerned and this represents an area for

Table 1 Number of creative responses attributed to subject types for the 2D and 3D problems

2D problems creative 3D problems creative

rsponses responses

Industrial designers (subjects) 235 137

Visual communications students (subjects) 285 99
Non-designers (law) (subjects) 169 53
Total creative 689 289

442 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000

 future research as it has significant implications, particularly for the teach-
ing of design. The column totals, which compare overall performance on
the 2D and 3D problems, clearly demonstrates that approximately three
times more creative forms were produced for the 2D than the 3D problems
and the frequencies in the body of the table demonstrate that this applied
equally to all participant groups. This result is consistent with Finke’s12
work but extends it by showing that it occurs with groups of people with
differing specialist knowledge. Again, this result identifies an interesting
area for future research.

3 Experiment 2
3.1 Experimental design and method
The results of the first experiment reported above demonstrated that the
creative mental synthesis task does differentiate between non-designers and
designers and between designers of different disciplines in terms of their
creative output. In this second experiment subjects with the same three
backgrounds as in the first experiment (industrial design, visual communi-
cations and non-designers) were used with similar numbers of subjects (20)
from each discipline. In addition the same number of judges (5) from each
discipline were used in this experiment.

Earlier we indicated that the design literature views drawing as an invalu-

able aid in creative mental synthesis. However it would appear that Ander-
son and Helstrup’s13 results, combining the creative mental synthesis task
and drawing, conflicts with the design literature. Also in the general intro-
duction to the paper we discussed the possibility that Andersen and Hel-
strup’s negative outcome could be the result of the participants having no
training in using drawing in the way required to increase creative output.
Given that we have shown in the first experiment differences between
design disciplines and between designers and non-designers in creative
output, it is possible to test this hypothesis by repeating our first experiment
and comparing performance of the three groups when they are allowed to
draw during the process of developing a form with their performance, and
when they have to perform the task using mental synthesis only. It would
be predicted that drawing would increase creative output for the design
groups relative to their performance when they are not allowed to draw,
and that non-designers would not change their level of performance.

In order to investigate themes found in both the cognitive psychology, and

design literature, we developed a series strategies (note strategies ABCD
in Table 2), made up of generic tasks within each strategy [note tasks 1
and 2 in Table 2).

Mental synthesis and creativity in design: an experimental examination 443

Table 2 Drawing strategies and task descriptions for experiment 2

Drawing strategies and creative mental synthesis

Strategy A Strategy B Strategy C Strategy D

Phase 1 Task 1
Using drawing to Using mental imagery Using drawing to Mentally develop and
develop ideas (time to develop ideas (time develop ideas (time name forms (time limit)
limit) limit), then draw the limit) (no parts given) THEN
ideas (no time limit) parts given to develop
the previously named
forms (no time limit)

Phase 2 Task 2
Using drawing to rotate Using drawing to rotate Using mental imagery Using drawing to rotate
and reinterpret forms and reinterpret forms alone to rotate forms and reinterpret forms
(time limit) (time limit) then draw and (time limit)
reinterpret forms (time
limit)

Essentially the procedures in this experiment were quite similar to those

of the 3D tasks in the first experiment (modeled on Finke12). However, the
conditions of when the act of drawing occurred were controlled. In all the
different Task 1’s subjects completed three trials lasting three minutes
each. When completing Task 2’s, in order to maintain consistency between
tasks, the subjects were given 9 minutes to complete the tasks. The
9 minutes corresponds to the time allowed in the Task 1 portion [3 trials
× 3 minutes each]. In order to maximize the creative output, in all tasks
they could create as many forms as they liked before the end of the
time period.

In the Task 1 portion of Strategy A and Strategy C (see Table 2 above)

the participants were instructed to draw while they developed a practical
invention. With the exception of being told to use drawing to develop the
invention instead of closing their eyes and using only ‘mental imagery’,
the procedures were the same as in experiment 1. As a common theme in
the design literature contends that design is essentially a creative synthesis
process and drawing aids in this creative process, this strategy investigates
this by allowing the subjects to use drawing as an aid to solving the prob-
lems given. In Task 2 of Strategy A, Strategy B and Strategy D (see Table
2), after having completed all three trials in Task 1, the subjects were to
use drawing to reinterpret their ideas from Task 1 by sketching the previous
forms in new orientations. They were instructed they could mirror the
forms, scale them, stretch them, and even slide parts. This was done with
the expectation of new ideas emerging. The idea that drawings that are

444 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000


14 Mathias, J R A Study of the
Problem Solving Strategies used
by Expert and Novice Designers
PhD Thesis, University of Aston,
Birmingham, UK (1993)
Mental synthesis and creativity in design: an experimental examination
produced trigger the emergence of new ideas or the re-interpretation of
existing ideas (see, for example Goldschmidt6, on emergence and re-
interpretation) is a common theme in the design literature. In Task 1 of
Strategy B (refer to Table 2) the participants were instructed to develop a
practical invention via ‘mental imagery’ only. The procedures were as
those in the first experiment.
With respect to the procedures for Task 2 of Strategy C (see Table 2), the
subjects were to reinterpret the ideas and drawings from Task 1 of Strategy
C by selecting one of the ideas then closing their eyes and mentally reinter-
preting it. The instructions for reinterpretation here, were identical to those
of the other Task 2’s in the other strategies, with the exception that subjects
were to do this by only mentally manipulating the forms. If they had a
reinterpretation they were to open their eyes, write the idea down, then
describe and draw it. If time had not run out they were to pick another
invention from Task 1 Strategy C and repeat the procedure. This strategy
investigates the possibility that the drawings are externalizations of internal
mental manipulations and explorations.
In Table 2, Task 1 of Strategy D was divided into two parts. Initially the
subjects closed their eyes and were required to develop an invention within
a given category without being given the parts. After they had an idea they
were to open their eyes, write it down, then if time had not run out they
closed their eyes again and endeavored to develop another idea. Once they
had done this, and written down the idea, they were given a triplet of parts
for each trial, to use to embody their ideas.
The basis for this strategy lies in Mathias14. He found novice designers
often use drawing to focus early on a design solution. For example, when
they are given the task of designing a doorknob, the novice would start
trying to embody the form early in the design process by drawing door-
knobs in general, thus operating a holistic–synthetic strategy in which an
overall solution is developed from the outset. However this then limits the
size of their search space. By contrast, experts would use drawing to gener-
ate ideas and concepts and not form at this stage of the process. By
operating at the level of abstract ideas and concepts experts develop a
complex search space opening up the possibility of innovative and creative
outcomes. This would appear to imply that it is better to separate the idea
generation stage and the synthesis stage (form generation). This is
reinforced by the fact that in the later stages of the design process,
Mathias14 found that expert designers use drawing and modeling for syn-
thesis to embody the ideas in physical form. Therefore if conditions are
controlled so as to mimic the strategies of expert designers, by forcing
445
 subjects to focus on developing ideas (concepts) first and then the embodi-
ment of those ideas, as design experts do, this should result in more creative
ideas being generated, and offers an opportunity to create forms which are
atypical and seen as more creative. Strategy D—Task 1 investigates the
experts’ strategy.

3.2 Results and discussion of experiment 2

Table 3 presents the results of this experiment with the frequency of syn-
thesized forms judged to be creative, being presented as a function of sub-
ject group and task within each strategy.

The row totals in Table 3 represent the number of creative responses pro-
duced by each of the subject groups. Given that the 3D task was used, it
would be expected, on the basis of experiment 1, that the industrial design-
ers would produce more creative forms than the visual communication
group with the non-designers performing poorly and this is clearly demon-
strated in the row totals. However the results are not strictly comparable
because the totals are based on a number of different strategies and tasks.
The direct comparison between the two experiments in terms of the task
performed involves Strategy B, Task 1 where the results clearly demon-
strate the expected pattern.

In the discussion of the design of experiment 2 we argued that the absence

of any beneficial effect of drawing in Andersen and Helstrup’s13 experi-
ment could be due to their use of subjects who had not been trained to
use drawing in the way required and that designers should be able to benefit
from drawing because they had developed this skill. Table 3 shows that
the non-designers’ performance remains at a uniformly low level with all
strategies and tasks including those conditions where drawing was allowed.

Table 3 Number of creative responses attributed to subject type, strategy type and task

Drawing strategies and creative mental synthesis (creativity 3D)

Strategy Strategy Strategy Strategy Strategy Strategy Strategy Strategy Total

A A B B C C D D creative
Task 1 Task 2 Task 1 Task 2 Task 1 Task 2 Task 1 Task 2

Industrial designers 15 12 36 13 13 11 79 10 180

Visual communications 9 8 18 5 10 5 59 7 121
students
Non-designers (law 2 0 5 3 2 0 26 2 40
students)
Total creative 26 20 59 21 25 16 155 19 341

446 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000


15 Verstijnen, I M Sketches of
creative Discovery: A psycho-
logical Inquiry into the Role of
Imagery and Sketching in Cre-
ative Discovery PhD Thesis,
Technical University Delft, Delft,
Netherlands (1997)
Mental synthesis and creativity in design: an experimental examination
The one exception is with Strategy D, Task 1 and this result will be dis-
cussed subsequently. However it is also apparent that, for both groups of
designers, neither drawing while synthesising forms (Strategies A and C,
Task 1) nor drawing to re-interpret forms (Strategies A,B,D, Task 2) results
in large increases in the number of creative forms being produced. Further
generally about the same number of creative forms are produced when
drawing is allowed in the Task 1 portion as are produced when drawing
is allowed in the second, Task 2 portion. Drawing, therefore, does not
increase the output when it is allowed while the forms are being produced
and it does not increase the output when it is used for re-interpretation.
Consequently, while designers produce more than non-designers and there
are differences between the design disciplines, drawing does not increase
the creative output of either designers or non-designers, at least, that is
when the creative mental synthesis task is used. However, perhaps the
important creative activity occurs when forms that have been produced can
be mentally manipulated, and drawing acts as a way of externalising the
results of these manipulations. Strategy C Task 2 explored this possibility
by requiring the subjects to use ‘mental imagery’ to reinterpret Task 1
drawings, with the expectation of a high number of creative responses. Our
results (see Strategy C Task 2) do not support this. Thus Strategy C Task
2 has no beneficial effect either. While Anderson and Helstrup13 and Ver-
stijnen15 found no difference between the drawing condition and mental
imagery condition in their creative mental synthesis research, our results
show the ‘mental imagery’ condition (Strategy B Task 1), not the drawing
condition (Strategy A Task 1), to be of greater benefit to designers and no
aid to the non-designers.
In our previous discussion, we noted a central theme in the predominantly
anecdotal design literature suggested that if drawing is both important dur-
ing the process of synthesising a form and then allows re-interpretation, a
strategy that allows this to occur should result in high numbers of creative
responses. This did not occur in the experiment as is apparent in the results
for Strategy A, Tasks 1 and 2. However we also pointed to literature which
suggests that experts separate ideas from the embodiment of ideas. If expert
designers are considered to be very creative then emulating their strategy
(Strategy D Task 1) should allow both the student designers and the non-
designers to generate substantially high levels of creative forms using the
experts’ technique. Our results point to a large difference between this
strategy and all the other strategies shown. This large difference is reflected
in the results for each subject type, not just the design subjects. This sug-
gests that utilising the thinking strategy of separating the generation of
ideas from the embodiment of those ideas, as expert designers do, substan-
tially aids both the designers and non-designers. This conflicts with the
447
 view that drawing assists the creative process through exploration, since
the creative output did not increase in the second task of Strategy D, where
drawing was used to reinterpret the forms produced in the first task. Also
noteworthy is that this is the only drawing strategy (Strategy D Task 1) in
which the non-designers made substantial gains in the number of creative
responses. This is significant in that they were not trained in drawing, we
merely controlled when they drew.

4 Conclusion
The first experiment demonstrated that senior design students do produce
more creative forms in a mental synthesis task than non-designers from a
discipline (law) where the focus is on verbal concepts. There are also dif-
ferences between the design disciplines in their output where superior per-
formance occurs when the type of parts to be synthesized are similar to
the parts normally used to produce forms within the discipline. Further the
results demonstrated that the complexity of the parts that have to be synthe-
sized (2D simple vs 3D complex), effects performance with simpler parts
leading to a much higher level of creative output for each of the subject
groups. As a result these outcomes of the experiment demonstrate that the
creative mental synthesis task appears to provide an interesting method-
ology for empirically examining issues that have been thought to be
important in the design literature.

The results of the second experiment further indicate how the methodology
can provide insights into design processes. By manipulating the structure
of the basic mental synthesis task it was possible to examine the role of
drawing and re-interpretation, two issues considered to be central to design
generally and creative design in particular. It was found that drawing did
not make a significant contribution to creative output whether it was used
while generating forms or in re-interpreting forms. This is a surprising
result as it directly contradicts strongly held views about the design pro-
cess. Increases in creative output, relative to the drawing conditions, how-
ever did occur with the design groups when the task was performed using
mental imagery only. Considerably larger increases in creative output were
found for the three different groups when participants were asked to
develop an idea relating to a given object category and were subsequently
given parts that had to be used to realize a form that embodied the idea
they had developed. The generation of creative output would therefore
appear to be facilitated where subjects are forced to develop their ideas
only using mental processes; a result consistent with Mathias’s14 argu-
ments.

This in many respects is a quite provocative outcome given that it is con-

trary to widely held views in the design literature as pointed out above,

448 Design Studies Vol 21 No 5 September 2000

 and the view in cognitive psychology that such a complex task places
considerable loads on working memory. These outcomes, with respect to
drawing, are not without possible explanations. While the participants were
all senior undergraduates, it may be that they have not developed the skills
required to take advantage of drawing that an expert would possess. Alter-
natively, while the focus was on creative mental synthesis, creative sol-
utions to real design problems are seen as being more complicated than
the tasks presented here. The issues which need to be creatively resolved,
in a product such as a piece of furniture or a piece of architecture contain
a rich tapestry of problems. They not only require creative concepts, they
also require creative embodiment. Perhaps drawing, as Verstijnen15 points
out, appears to be more useful in the analysis phase of the design process.
This is not inconsistent with the results here, with respect to the separation
of ideas (concepts) from the embodiment of those ideas
(synthesis/analysis). Essentially these tasks may not be strictly interpreted
as design tasks. These issues are open to empirical examination, as it would
be possible to develop the tasks to make them more like design tasks.
While these possibilities could explain the failure of drawing to have an
impact, they cannot diminish either, the significance of the strong and con-
sistent increases in creative output that were demonstrated with the use of
mental imagery, or the view that a useful and interesting methodology for
examining cognitive processes in design has been found and developed.

Mental synthesis and creativity in design: an experimental examination 449