Design anthropologists Gatt and Ingold's concept of correspondence describes a designed artefact's ability to appropriately represent a given community's perspectives. For design-researchers operating in co-design contexts, correspondence is helpful for ensuring that final outcomes are 'tuned' to the current and aspirational experiences of user-communities.

However, while design-researchers working in practice-led contexts share many concepts and techniques with their design anthropology colleagues, this paper argues that for Design approaches concerned with plausible, anticipatory perspectives, correspondence is a limited concept that can hamper the role of design imagination. In response to this claim, this paper contributes the following outcomes.

First, it presents a short theoretical review of the literature that compares design anthropology's critical objective with projective research. Second, the paper outlines key characteristics of correspondence, suggesting its conceptual value and limitations for projective research. This outline is followed by an introductory discussion of Bakhtin's notion of creative understanding. The concluding outcome of this comparison is the theorisation of creative correspondence, a novel design concept that integrates crucial concepts from correspondence and creative understanding to leverage the unique abilities of design artefacts to generate and ultimately contribute a shared perspective on plausible, preferential futures. Accordingly, the third outcome of the paper is a contextualisation of the relevance of creative correspondence, taking the form of a brief discussion of a community-orientated co-design project involving the author and members of the Westbury community.