A New Course on Creativity in an Engineering Program: Foundations and Issues

The importance of innovation in the world's economy, now undeniable, draws great attention to the need to improve organizations' creative potential. In the last 60 years, hundreds of books have been written on the subject and hundreds of webpages display information on how to be more creative and achieve innovation. Several North American and European universities offer graduated programs in creativity. However, building an effective and validated creativity training program is not without challenges. Because of the nature of their work, engineers are often asked to be innovative. Without aiming for a degree in creativity, could future engineers benefit from training programs in creativity? This article presents the conceptual framework and pedagogical elements of a new course in creativity for engineering students.Comment: 10 pages, Intl Conf on Innovative Design and Manufacturing (pp. 270-275). Aug 13-15, Montreal. IEEE Conference Proceeding

Unpacking capabilities underlying design (thinking) process

Engineering graduates must know how to frame and solve non-routine problems. While design classes explicitly teach problem framing and solving, it is lacking throughout much of the rest of the engineering curriculum and is often relegated to capstone classes at the end of the students’ educational experience. This paper explores problem framing and solving through the lens of experiential learning theory. It captures core problem framing and solving approaches from critical, design and systems thinking and concludes with a table of learning outcomes that might be drawn upon in designing an engineering curriculum that more fully develops the problem framing and solving capabilities of its students

Staff and student perspectives on embedding sustainability into the engineering curriculum

Recognising that sustainability is an important concept within engineering this paper describes a project run by a team of academics which sought to investigate how engineering students viewed sustainability, what role they perceived it to hold in their work, and how they felt it should be incorporated into their education. Students and academics acted as equal stakeholders in the project with the students coming from a range of backgrounds including undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Mechanical Engineering, Product Design, Electrical Power Engineering and Multidisciplinary Design Innovation. The investigation sought to understand student and staff perceptions of how the university approached the concept of engineering education for sustainable development into the curricula. An additional aim of the research and activities of the project was to contribute to influencing how sustainability may contribute to engineering curriculum change within UK higher education. The activities conducted by the project team demonstrated that students and staff currently have an awareness, yet a limited understanding, of sustainability. Students strongly felt that sustainability was a key part of an engineer’s role and responsibilities. The findings recognized scope for concepts of sustainability to be more effectively included it in the curriculum for engineers adding many opportunities for imaginative pedagogies. It is proposed that students should also be encouraged to generate their own conceptions of sustainability and globalization and participate in discussions around these to ensure personal engagement with them. The project outcome generated valuable material which could support communication and dialogue about sustainability to support the education of global engineers

Augmenting the 6-3-5 method with design information

This paper describes a comparative study between the 6-3-5 Method and the ICR Grid. The ICR Grid is an evolved variant of 6-3-5 intended to better integrate information into the concept generation process. Unlike a conventional 6-3-5 process where participants continually sketch concepts, using the ICR Grid (the name derived from its Inform, Create, Reflect activities and structured, grid-like output) participants are additionally required to undertake information search tasks, use specific information items for concept development, and reflect on the merit of concepts as the session progresses. The results indicate that although the quantity of concepts was lower, the use of information had a positive effect in a number of areas, principally the quality and variety of output. Although grounded in the area of product development, this research is applicable to any organisation undertaking idea generation and problem solving. As well as providing insights on the transference of information to concepts, it holds additional interest for studies on the composition and use of digital libraries

On the influence of creativity in basic programming learning at a first-year Engineering course

Teaching fundamentals of programming is a complex task that involves the students’ acquisition of diverse knowledge and skills. It is also well known that programming often requires a certain degree of creativity. There are some studies on how to foster creativity with programming, but few studies have analyzed the influence of students creativity on their performance as programmers. In this paper we present the results of a study, with a sample of 89 freshmen engineering students. Our results suggest (p<0.01) that a high level of creativity is correlated with achieving excellence in programming. Creativity is a generic competence which is not currently covered with in most engineering curricula, and we conclude it should be taken into account. Females, diverse thinking student and some disadvantage groups may benefit from a free-thinking environment in the classroom, in particular at their first-year in college.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Takemusu Aiki: Insights into Optimizing Ideational Flow

The Fourth Art of Management and Organization Conference, Banff, Canada, 9-12 August 2008This paper will investigate how designers can connect broader understandings of ‘leadership’with specific design knowledge to enhance creative performance. The emphasis is on how designers can potentially ‘manage’ their thinking within the ideation process – maximise “ways”to spread ‘memes’. A meme is a rule, concept, or idea that can be spread from one person to another. Designers have been described as ‘memetic engineers’ (Dawkins, 1989) because they produce memes or units of cultural information that are recycled and evolve over time. Memes emerge through ‘imitation and recombination’ according to Blackmore (1999), by mixing up ideas to produce new combinations. One approach to understanding and reflecting on existing disciplinary experiences, as well as challenging creative potential, is through researching other conative “ways” – such as ‘Aikido’ – to embrace and reflect on ‘how’ we think instead of purely ‘what’ we think

Discovery Is Never By Chance: Designing for (Un)Serendipity

Serendipity has a long tradition in the history of science as having played a key role in many significant discoveries. Computer scientists, valuing the role of serendipity in discovery, have attempted to design systems that encourage serendipity. However, that research has focused primarily on only one aspect of serendipity: that of chance encounters. In reality, for serendipity to be valuable chance encounters must be synthesized into insight. In this paper we show, through a formal consideration of serendipity and analysis of how various systems have seized on attributes of interpreting serendipity, that there is a richer space for design to support serendipitous creativity, innovation and discovery than has been tapped to date. We discuss how ideas might be encoded to be shared or discovered by ‘association-hunting’ agents. We propose considering not only the inventor’s role in perceiving serendipity, but also how that inventor’s perception may be enhanced to increase the opportunity for serendipity. We explore the role of environment and how we can better enable serendipitous discoveries to find a home more readily and immediately

Innovative Work Behaviour: Measurement and Validation

Although both scientists and practitioners emphasize the importance of innovative work behavior (IWB) of individual employees for organizational success, the measurement of employees' IWB is still in evolution. Here, we present two multi-source studies that aimed to develop and validate a measure of IWB. Four related dimensions of IWB are distinguished: opportunity exploration, idea generation, championing and application. We derived a tenitem measure of these IWB dimensions from a pilot survey among matched dyads of 81 professionals in a research institute and their supervisors. Next, a survey among a matching sample of 703 knowledge workers and their supervisors from 94 different firms was done. We used confirmatory factor analyses to examine convergent and discriminant validity, and hierarchical multilevel regression to test hypothesized relationships of IWB with participative leadership, external work contacts and innovative output (proposed as an initial nomological network). Results demonstrate strong convergent validity of the IWB measure as all four dimensions contribute to an overall measure of IWB. Support for discriminant validity is weaker as correlations between some dimensions are relatively high. Finally, IWB is positively related with participative leadership, external work contacts and innovative output, providing first evidence for nomological validity.

Understanding the Roles of sketching in product design

Sketching is an essential part of the tradition and practice of design. However, despite the extensive literature on the subject, the roles of sketching in the design are still not fully understood. Therefore, this PhD study was carried out to understand the roles of sketching in the product design field and to develop the means to support the design sketching process. Hypotheses emerged from the review of the literature and led to three descriptive studies: a pilot study to identify the roles of sketching in design; a survey of design students; a survey of design professionals. Data collected from these studies were used to test and verify the hypotheses. It was found that the major roles of sketching in design were related to design ideation and design communication. The comparison between design students and professionals showed that they tend to perceive the major roles of sketching differently, but shared similar opinions on the major roles of talking sketches, sketching expertise and as a practical supporting tool. In addition, an Ideation Segment Model was proposed, which describes the process that sketching ideas evolve into final design outcomes and locates the potential supporting tools in the sketching process. Consequently, a practical supporting tool was developed to enhance understanding of design sketching, to provide external stimuli, and to improve sketching expertise. The supporting tool, entitled the PD-Sketching Primer and PD-Sketching Toolkit, was tested with education and positive feedback was received. This research has contributed towards understanding the roles of sketching in design, e.g. it is the first empirical study of ‘non-working sketches’ in the design field. It has generated new knowledge and tools to support the design sketching process. This supporting tool is one of only a few resources designed to support sketching activity and creative performance in the product design field.Open Acces