This site is designed for those interested in design in its various forms. My objective is to provide ideas which may be of help at the moment of designing. If there is a difference between a good and a bad designer it is his design creativity.

Many people think that this is an incidental feature within the psychological layout of people, but I believe that just as theoretical notions, creativity can be acquired afterwards. After all, imagination is a mental process just as the formal logic reasoning we apply to mathematics. That is to say, it can be exercised and developed.

How? Well, by acknowledging this intellectual mechanism we will be able to develop it to the top. Nobody can obtain the square root of any number unless he knows the way in which he shall think in order to do it. Likewise, nobody can be creative without knowing the mental mechanism through which creative elements are generated.

How do we learn this intellectual mechanism? In two ways, the very same through which we learn how to add: by induction and by defining the procedure. Induction is used to ascribe properties or relations to a type based on observations of recurring patterns. The observation of different patterns of one type reveals the general premise that rules them and that is implicit.

On the other hand, definition is no more than stating the procedure explicitly. In the example of the addition, we would say that it is the arithmetic operation consisting of joining figures in search for another one. In the case of creativity, it is the mental operation that enables the creation of things in a way that did not exist formerly.