Structural Innovation

After speaking to my peers for some time, I realized something that was actually very obvious: Game Design as a task is split into two main factors.

1. Coming up with a concept
2. Specifying and Communicating this concept through a Design Document

There's a plethora of research, information and established methodologies for 2. However, the former is a lot less established. Throughout my education, I've only come into contact with methods of creativity that primarily used brainstorming or random association techniques. However, brainstorming is often arduous and inefficient- depending heavily on group dynamics, whereas I've found random association mostly useless to a field as specific as games.

Where am I going with this?

I guess what I'm trying to convey is that there is a lack of structure to the creative process of game design. Most concept development relies entirely on the creativity of the individual, which usually means sporadic development of new (and good) ideas. Perhaps the current state of affairs can be explained via the following:

To come up with a concept you start at point A, and need to traverse B and C to get to D. Highly creative individuals can skip B and C and go straight to D. However, this doesn't mean they have achieved the best possible path to D and it's to be expected that the ideas generated will be personally biased (which can be both good and bad) Also, less creative individuals might get stranded at B or C and produce mediocre ideas.

A technique by Edward D. Tauber called Heuristic Ideation Technique (HIT) proposes a formalization of the creativity process, which he illustrates with examples from the food industry. In this technique, you would identify all relevant factors to a domain and examine combinations. However, applying this approach to game design will differ in one fundamental aspect: relevant factors are not bound to reality. Game designers can come up with literally anything, whereas food product designers cannot.

What I'm currently proposing to research, is the use of semantic heuristics to produce structural innovation at a constant rate, using existing (proven) ideas and altering their function to stimulate creative use of their relevant factors. Obviously, this still requires creativity from the individual to read the new possible contexts of the altered functionality, but this level of creativity is considerably less intense than before.