The aim of this study is to clarify the characteristics of creative concept generation process in design. The authors analyzed the characteristics of the concept generation process by comparing between the linguistic interpretation task and design task, from the viewpoints of the thought types ( analogy, blending , and thematic relation ) and recognition types ( commonality, alignable difference and nonalignable difference ). In our experiment, the subjects were required to interpret a novel noun-noun phrase, create a design concept from the same noun-noun phrase, and list the similarities and dissimilarities between the two nouns. The results reveal that blending and nonalignable difference are important factors of the creative concept generation process.