Erin L. Beatty
ABSTRACT
Our previous research has indicated that poetry and design are two forms of creative activity that have many parallels, including the role of "sources of inspiration" in driving the creation of solution ideas and the central involvement of initial solution concepts or "primary generators" [11] in providing a way for designers/poets to scope tasks in terms of core objectives. In the present paper we report a study involving interviews with two highly-respected, award-winning UK poets who we consider to be exceptional in their field (i.e., "super-experts"), given their major international standing. Our research allowed us to generalise key aspects of our earlier findings, such as the role of primary generators, and also uncovered new observations, perhaps because of the highly self-reflective nature of these poets' understanding of their own expertise, which was not so apparent in our previous studies with less expert individuals. Our discussion explores the nature of our super-experts' poetic creativity, as well as the implications of our analysis for an understanding of design expertise.
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