How the co-creative process affects concept formation

The importance of forming concepts in one's mind has been argued from various perspectives in design studies. This experimental study examines how the co-creative process affects concept formation considering its depth. The authors conducted a learning experiment applying three processes; non-interactive (NI), interactive but non-co-creative (NC), and interactive and co-creative processes (C). To evaluate whether and how deep the concept is formed in the examinee's mind, mimetic Japanese words, which contain several different explicit concepts underlying a certain integrated implicit concept, were chosen as learning materials. The examinees without any knowledge about mimetic Japanese words were gathered globally and the experiment was conducted fully online using English. Examinees were tested several times to measure how they had formed these concepts for comparing the processes. The findings suggest that the co-creative process enhances the depth of concept formation: involvement load and willingness to participate in the co-creative process lead to deeper concept formation.