Less is more original?

Some designers deliberately develop one design solution; others consciously search for multiple alternatives before selecting one. Since both ways of working are used by successful designers, the choice between them is usually considered a matter of preference. The experiment reported on here suggests that this choice may have more fundamental implications than is generally assumed. Student designers were asked to create compositions with a fixed set of elements within a limited time, which were scored on various scales. Correlations reveal that the more compositions students produced, the fewer unique combinations of elements they created. Or, vice versa, the more unique compositions they created, the less productive they were. Moreover, originality correlates positively with the number of unique combinations, and the extent to which the original shapes are restructured. Together these results suggest that the more time designers spend on combining and changing elements within a design solution, at the cost of producing fewer solutions, the more time they have for creating an original solution.