Creativity in Engineering

Novel Solutions to Complex Problems

David H Cropley

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780128003183
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia applicata

Creativity is like an iceberg - the resulting new idea, or novel solution is only 10% of the effort. The other 90% is the complex interplay of thinking skills and strategies, personal and motivational properties that activate these skills and strategies, and the social and organizational factors of the environment that influence the creative process. Creativity in Engineering focuses on the Process, Person, Product, and Place to understand when and why creativity happens in the engineering environment and how it can be further encouraged.

Special Features:

• Applies findings in creativity research to the engineering arena
• Defines engineering creativity and differentiates it from innovation
• Discusses personality and motivational factors that impact creativity
• Clarifies the role of creativity in the design process
• Details the impact of thinking skills and strategies in creativity
• Identifies the role the organization and environment plays in encouraging creativity

• Discusses the 4P's of Creativity: Person, Product, Process, and Place
• Provides tactics and tools that will help users foster creativity in engineering environments
• Identifies how creativity results in innovative new solutions to problems
• Applies creativity research and knowledge to the engineering space

Chapter 1

Introduction

The opening chapter begins by considering the impact of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik I in October 1957. This event was pivotal in sparking interest in the relationship between creativity and engineering. Researchers turned to psychology to understand better the qualitative connections between creativity and engineering. What qualities of a product make it creative? What qualities of people help or hinder their ability to generate novel ideas? How does the environment in which engineering creativity takes place affect the generation of ideas? What mental processes lead to the generation of novel ideas, in contrast to ideas that lack originality and surprise? The modern creativity era has delivered a deep understanding of the Four Ps (or 4Ps) of creativity—Person, Product, Process, and Press. A goal of this book is to reconnect the fields of creativity and engineering, to ensure that engineering continues to deliver effective and novel solutions to the challenges we face in the 21^st century.

Keywords

Creativity; Person; Product; Process; Press; Phase; Engineering; Novelty; Ideas

“Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.”

George Lois, 1931–, Art Director and Author

The Sputnik Shock

The next time you are driving to an unfamiliar location, listening to the synthetic tones of your smart phone telling you to “Take next exit onto I-10 East,” spare a thought for the significance of the date October 4, 1957. This date saw the birth of a profound technological revolution, the outcomes of which affect each one of us, every day of our lives. It is the date on which the disparate fields of engineering, technology, psychology, management, and economics began to flow together to give to us an understanding of how and why we develop technological solutions to modern, complex problems, and the value that these solutions deliver to society. It is a date that has had a far-reaching impact on our modern, 21^st century lifestyle, influencing our economic security, our physical security, our health, our education, and much more.

You may recognize this as the date of the launch, by the Soviet Union, of Sputnik I—the world’s first artificial satellite. It was more than that, however, because it ushered in the Space Age. Although this may seem a somewhat distant and mundane milestone to Generation Y¹ and beyond, it is wise not to underestimate the profound impact that this event had on the Western psyche at the time (Dickson, 2001). Indeed, that impact has been described as the Sputnik Shock (A. J. Cropley, 2001; A. J. Cropley & Cropley, 2009), and Western newspapers at the time roared headlines such as “Red ‘Moon’ over London!” and “Space Age Is Here!” Set against the backdrop of the Cold War tension between the Soviet and Western blocs, both sides’ preoccupation with nuclear weapons technology, and the recent conflict on the Korean peninsula, it is not difficult to imagine the fear and consternation that this technological trump card engendered in Western countries. Dickson (2001) reflects that “it was as if Sputnik was the starter’s pistol in an exciting new race. I was electrified, delirious, as I witnessed the beginning of the Space Age” (p. 3).

As interesting as the history of the early Cold War years is, what is the connection between your navigational problems, the disembodied voice on your smart phone, and Sputnik I? For engineers, one obvious link is that this first artificial satellite opened up our minds to the possibilities of new application areas of engineering. Communications, for example, would no longer be bound by terrestrial constraints such as the curvature of the earth, the physical barriers presented by the earth’s oceans, the vagaries of atmospheric conditions, and the like. The idea of bouncing radio signals off satellites to facilitate intercontinental communications has evolved, over the decades since Sputnik, into the Global Positioning System (GPS) network of satellites that is helping you to find the way to your destination. However, the connection between your drive down the I-10 and Sputnik runs far deeper than just the technological possibilities that it opened up. It has much to do with the economic success, and the consequent impact on standards of living, that Western countries such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Australia, and others have enjoyed for more than 50 years. Indeed, the Sputnik Shock is responsible, in many ways, for our modern understanding of what Mokyr (1990) describes as “the lever of riches.”

In fact, the Sputnik Shock of October 4, 1957, triggered a series of actions and outcomes that first linked creativity (in the sense of the generation of effective novelty), innovation (the exploitation of effective novelty), and engineering (the design and development of technological solutions to problems) together in a systematic and scientific way. It kick-started a rigorous examination of the association between the creation of new products, processes, systems, and services—technological creativity—and economic progress that has underpinned the development and success of nations for centuries. For the first time, however, it prompted not an economic explanation for this success, but a psychological one. The Sputnik Shock, in short, started a revolution in thinking that has attempted to explain not only the new technology itself, but also who develops the new technology, how and why they develop it, and where this development takes place.

As engineers, we are familiar with the technological consequences of the launch of Sputnik I. This event kicked off the Space Race that reached its zenith in the moon landing of July 1969. It stimulated a large number of novel technological spin-offs that trace their antecedence either directly, or indirectly, to the activities of NASA in the 1950s and 1960s. Memory foam, anti-corrosion coatings, cochlear implants, scratch-resistant eyeglass lenses, insulin pumps, and charge-coupled devices can all be seen as innovations that grew out of the catalyst of the U.S. Space Program,² itself jump-started by the Sputnik Shock of October 1957.

The Sputnik Shock also had other profound technological effects that have left important legacies in the 21^st century. DARPA, the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was created in 1958 in direct response to the launch of Sputnik I, and its founding mission was “to prevent and create strategic surprise.”³ DARPA can count Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), RISC computing, global positioning satellites, and the Internet among its technological achievements. However, while the success of your drive to that unfamiliar location owes a great deal to the impact of Sputnik I, there is, arguably, a more significant impact buried in DARPA’s founding mission that links creativity to engineering—technological surprise.

Even as the direct technological impact of Sputnik I exerted its influence in the West, U.S. lawmakers began to look more deeply for the underlying causes of the Soviet Union’s strategic achievement. The U.S. government realized, for example, that similar technological achievements could be made only by highly skilled people, and Congress sought to address this aspect of the problem through the National Defense Education Act (NDEA⁴) of 1958. This legislative solution was designed to address, among other things, a shortage of graduates in mathematics and engineering—a key resource in the development of new and superior technology. However, the final piece of the puzzle linking creativity, innovation, engineering and technology fell into place as experts began to hypothesize (rightly or wrongly) that the Soviet threat in space was not only a quantitative problem (a shortage of engineers in the United States, for example) but also a qualitative one. In particular, there was a sense that Soviet engineering achievements, and their success with Sputnik I, could be attributed to superior creativity (A. J. Cropley & Cropley, 2009). For the first time, therefore, attention began to turn from economic issues that underpin the growth and development of technology—for example, investment and capital/labor ratios—and instead began to focus on the particular qualities of a product that make it creative—surprisingness, novelty, and effectiveness. Attention simultaneously turned to the qualities of the people and organizations that make the technology, and the processes by which they achieve the development of new and effective technological solutions to problems.

It turned out that a scientific foundation linking creativity, engineering, and technology—in a way that could help to explain the qualitative nature of the connection—already existed. The psychologist J. P. Guilford had delivered, back in 1950, a groundbreaking presidential address to the American Psychological Association’s annual convention. In very simple terms, Guilford (1950) argued that human intellectual ability had been defined too narrowly in terms of factors such as speed, accuracy, and correctness—what he termed convergent thinking—and instead needed to be conceived of in a broader sense, to include factors such as generating alternatives, seeing multiple possibilities and so forth. In other words, he saw intellectual ability as encompassing both convergent (analytical) thinking and divergent thinking. The latter—divergent thinking—is seen frequently as a defining characteristic of creativity. Engineers, in fact, are no strangers to this duality of thinking styles—design, after all, is characterized by the fact that (Horenstein, 2002) “… if more than one solution exists, and if deciding upon a suitable path demands … making choices, performing tests, iterating, and evaluating, then the activity is most certainly design. Design can include analysis, but it also must involve at least one of these latter elements” (p. 23). Engineering, in short, is all about creative problem solving.

The Sputnik Shock of October 4, 1957, therefore brought together, for the first time, the apparently disparate fields of creativity, with its psychological foundations, and engineering by stimulating recognition of the important role of divergent thinking in the process of designing technological solutions to complex problems. It provided the spark that has seen an explosion of research into what makes people able to devise new and effective solutions to problems—the psychology of creativity—and it lit the fuse of technological innovation that has given us GPS, the Internet, and many other systems and products that we now take for granted. There remains, however, one puzzle that is all the more surprising given the common interests of both creativity and engineering as they moved through the Space Age and into in the modern Digital, or Information Age. That puzzle is, simply, why is there not a stronger connection between creativity and engineering in the 21^st century? Creativity is concerned with the generation of effective and novel solutions to problems. Engineering is concerned more specifically with generating technological solutions to problems. Despite this, engineering is still frequently seen as predominantly analytical in nature—“a common misconception … is that engineering is ‘just’ applied math and science” (Brockman, 2009, p. x). It stands to reason that successful engineering must focus not only on analysis and convergent thinking, but also on the vital role that synthesis and divergent thinking play in the creation of technology. Focusing on one at the expense of the other risks not only the integrity of the solutions themselves, but also the skill base of the people involved in the creation of these solutions. This book is concerned with reestablishing and rebalancing the link between creativity and engineering.

The Link between Creativity and Engineering

On the surface, that rebalancing should be straightforward. We all agree that creativity is an essential element of 21^st...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. The Importance of Creativity in Engineering
• Chapter 3. Phases: Creativity and the Design Process
• Chapter 4. Product: The Creativity of Things
• Chapter 5. Process: Generating Creative Ideas
• Chapter 6. Person: The Who of Creativity
• Chapter 7. Press: Creativity and the Role of the Environment
• Chapter 8. Innovation: Exploiting Creativity
• Chapter 9. Creativity Training
• Chapter 10. Embedding Creativity in Engineering Education
• References
• Index