Humour and Creative Design: Twins or Partners?

Abstract

A comparison between humour and creative design is presented in this paper. First, we will show that humour comprehension process and creative design are twins because they share similar mechanisms. Both processes start with a "story" and ends with concepts that are surprising. Reader expectations and user requirements are both updated along the process. To demonstrate the similarity between the two processes, examples of humour comprehension and design processes were analysed. Second, we will show that humour and creative design are partners in a sense that they can influence each other. Humour is influenced by creative design process because humour production implies a creative design process in which designer has to creatively come up with a text that incorporates two irrelevant or even opposite scripts to produce humour effects. Creative design can be enhanced by humorous conditions as some research has found. An interpretation of these phenomena is also presented based on a theoretical model of design creativity.