Strategizing Surprise: Exploring the Complexity of Surprise in Creative Design Processes

Surprise is fundamental to human action and cognition. While much of human behavior can be attributed to a propensity to minimize the element of surprise, creativity is the exception. Creativity involves breaking free from extant knowledge and contextual constraints to generate unexpected, valuable ideas. This is especially true in design. In an oft-cited paper, Dorst and Cross (2001) even argued that surprise is “what keeps a designer from routine behaviour” where the “’surprising’ parts of a problem or solution drive the originality streak in the design project” (p. 436). Anecdotal evidence suggests that designers actively seek and deploy methods and tools to elicit surprise in their creative processes. But exactly how designers ‘strategize surprise’ in such ways remains poorly understood. Informed by advancements in cognitive psychology, we argue for further investigating the complex functions of surprise in creative processes, not least its detection, management, potential for errors, and impact on individual and group behaviors. We find it crucial to move beyond psychometric tests to examine surprise ‘in the wild,’ such as in the creative domain of design, which we focus on here. We contribute findings from a state-of-the-art literature review of twenty years of naturalistic, situated design research on the complex functions of surprise in creative processes. Key discussion points include the ongoing relevance of Schön's theories, the consequences of surprise-induced errors, the interaction between creative process and product, and the pertinence of surprise in our creative interactions with generative artificial intelligence (AI). We end by proposing future research initiatives to deepen our understanding of surprise in creativity in general and in design in particular.