One of the most important criteria for performance quality in both art and design seems to be the creativity of the product. Being original and innovative is by definition a feature of both areas. The primary objective of this study was to determine whether human judgment of creativity is a reliable and valid method in design evaluation and selection. In a first experiment, the judgments of experts, nonexperts, and people with an intermediate level of expertise were compared. They rated 44 first-year designs on creativity, prototypical value, attractiveness, interest, technical quality, expressiveness, and integrating capacity. Pearson product-moment correlations for creativity were relatively low, ranging from .23 to .29. There was little difference between experts and nonexperts. The results confirmed the research in artwork assessment. In Experiment 2 the results were replicated with senior design students as judges, a group with an intermediate level of expertise. Ratings were given for 3 different designs. Correlations were much higher, ranging from .48 to .57. This could be a consequence of the homogeneity of the group of judges. The prototypicality of a design, the distance between the design and the observers' internal representation, appeared to discriminate between creativity and other aesthetic criteria. A pair-comparisons analysis also contributed to the definition of creativity in both general and domain-specific terms.
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