Gesture, Creativity and Design

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.