Creativity in the Design Process. Exploring the Influences of the Digital Evolution.

The ongoing scenario of digital transition is deeply impacting the human being, from the inner, less visible, cognitive, and emotional levels that concern individuals to the outer, more evident and articulated interactions with other people. The ongoing digital transition has led to the complete restructuring of space and time creating a third reality, the onlife, a new experience of a hyperconnected world where physical and digital converge. Major digital transformations (e.g. artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, etc..) are so ubiquitous and invisible that are becoming our next nature, blurring the distinction between human, machine, and nature. Human being is co-evolving with digital technologies and a new digitally enhanced generation is growing up totally immersed in a digital world, accepting digital enhancement as an opportunity and an integral part of their existence. The ongoing digital evolution is impacting every sector of our society, changing people’s mindsets as well as behavioural and social attitudes, creating both significant opportunities and threats that need to be managed and guided properly. Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and other emerging technologies, are impacting the process of creating and innovating, transforming the industrial economy and the associated job market as well as the overall educational system, therefore requiring new skills. Among the others, creativity has been recognized as one of the most important human skill to face the complex social-economic challenges brought by the digital era we are going through and to manage new digital tools putting them at the service of the community. It has become a democratic necessity which helps people in generating novel and useful ideas and get the advantage of the opportunities offered by digital technologies in any field. Developing creative abilities and a design approach has become, therefore, a mission and a requirement for achieving a Digital Maturity, meaning the ability to adapt to an ever-changing digital landscape, to strategically collaborate with machines and to wisely lead the technological development to boost innovation. In this scenario design should play the fundamental role of guiding and supporting the transformation of people toward Digital Maturity, by empowering their creativity and design skills. To play the role of a guide, it become fundamental for the design discipline to explore the new shapes of creativity – namely Digital Creativity - which require to study the potential influence of digital technologies on creativity and the new digital opportunities for empowering the creative design process. The book aims to provide an open and integrated view of creativity in the XXI century merging theories and case studies from design, psychology, sociology, computer science and Human computer interaction, having benefit from a continuous dialogue with a network of experts in these fields. The book reflects on why and how design and design research should explore Digital Creativity, and promote the empowerment of creativity, presenting two flexible tools specifically developed for: 1) observe the influences on multiple level of human creativity in the digital transition and 2) understand their positive and negative effect on the creative design process. An overview of the main influences and opportunities collected by adopting the two tools are presented with guidelines to design actions to empower the process for innovation. In this transition, design must acquire the fundamental knowledge to update its toolbox and educational models for the next digital generation of designers. Current and future designers’ role should be to enhance and facilitate the creative abilities of a different generation of people, to guide the technological development addressing new digital challenges generating positive implications in the world and achieving large-scale innovation. We are all moving towards digital enhancement and companies, school, educators, should be able to deal with a new generation that represents the worker of the future.