What is a Deficit Approach?

The “deficit approach” refers to a pervasive approach in creativity and innovation that frames the process as one of identifying and filling gaps, lacks, or needs—in essence, treating creativity as a response to a pre-existing problem or deficiency. This approach is a logical – if unrecognized as such, approach to approaching reality from a Developmental/Progressive framework.

In this ubiquitous model, in which the creative act is conceived as the generation of solutions to known problems, with the underlying assumption that the world presents us with deficits to be remedied and that novelty emerges by ideating ways to fill these voids.

At its core, the deficit approach is a logic of innovation rooted in problem-solving: it presumes that the creative process begins with recognizing a lack of, articulating a problem, and then ideating solutions to address this absence. This approach is deeply embedded in Enlightenment traditions of making and thinking, where the world is seen as a set of universal needs, functions, or purposes waiting to be satisfied by human ingenuity. Additionally, the model is linear: identify the deficit, ideate, plan, and implement—a sequence that privileges ideation and mental abstraction over embodied, relational engagement with the world.

As such, it cannot come to terms with the processes that creatively generate new ways of being alive, new creative problems, and the ongoing creative nature of reality that is excessive and open (rather than lacking and striving towards completion/closure/finality).

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See also: Direct Design, Development, Problems, Change-in-Degree, Change-in-Kind