Data-driven design as hill-climbing
This is probably the best analogy I've read for data-driven design versus creative design. It comes from our favorite design luminary, Don Norman, in his Design Without Designers article in Core77 this week.
Data-driven design is "hill-climbing," a well-known algorithm for optimization. Imagine standing in the dark in an unknown, hilly terrain. How do you get to the top of the hill when you can't see? Test the immediate surroundings to determine which direction goes up the most steeply and take a step that way. Repeat until every direction leads to a lower level.
But what if the terrain has many hills? How would you know whether you are on the highest? Answer: you can't know. This is called the "local maximum" problem: you can't tell if you are on highest hill (a global maximum) or just at the top of a small one.
When a computer does hill climbing on a mathematical space, it tries to avoid the problem of local maxima by initiating climbs from numerous, different parts of the space being explored, selecting the highest of the separate attempts. This doesn't guarantee the very highest peak, but it can avoid being stuck on a low-ranking one. This strategy is seldom available to a designer: it is difficult enough to come up with a single starting point, let alone multiple, different ones. So, refinement through testing in the world of design is usually only capable of reaching the local maximum. Is there a far better solution (that is, is there a different hill which yields far superior results)? Testing will never tell us.
Here is where creative people come in. Breakthroughs occur when a person restructures the problem, thereby recognizing that one is exploring the wrong space. This is the creative side of design and invention. Incremental enhancements will not get us there.
via Core77
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