Finding Möjligheter: Creativity and Ill-Structured Problems

Centered around the concept of Möjligheter, this paper focuses on motivating the rationale for faculty to 1) add more authentic problems to their design courses, 2) foster more interdisciplinary challenges in their courses, or 3) approach design instruction in a more consistent, scholarly or philosophic way. As educators, we often show students how to do individual problems step by step, and find the one right solution but significantly less in helping them to develop the skills and knowledge needed to view a problem from multiple perspectives, understand the relationship of creativity to engineering design and employ these in ill-structured problems. Möjligheter provide a framework for exploring both needs (problems) and benefits (value). In this paper, we argue how engineering faculty should instead, show how creativity can be used in the service of constrained, if ill-structured, projects, requires collaboration, and ultimately allows students to develop better solutions than when we teach design without explicitly addressing creativity.