Engineering Creativity: Ideas from the Visual Arts for Engineering Programs

Engineers being educated today must be creative and innovative. An important part of developing creative and innovative solutions is the framework within which students are taught to think and formulate ideas. The scientific method is among the first such framework taught to students as early as elementary school and reinforced into college. Within engineering curricula, students are introduced to an engineering design process. These methods are valuable but do not necessarily translate to developing creative ability that can be more broadly applied. In fine art programs, however, deliberate effort is made to develop creative abilities in addition to learning technical processes within which to showcase that creativity. This paper compares the scientific method, engineering design process, and creative methods taught in the fine arts. Through this comparison, commonalities are identified and insights from fine arts creative methods are applied to the engineering curriculum. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION “Creativity (invention, innovation, thinking outside the box, art) is an indispensable quality for engineering, and given the growing scope of the challenges ahead and the complexity and diversity of the technologies of the 21 century, creativity will grow in importance.” These words were written in 2004 as the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) described what they envisioned of the engineer of 2020. The NAE includes creativity as one of six “engineering habits of mind” that successful engineers must develop, in addition to mastering technical content (the other five are systems thinking, optimism, collaboration, communication, and ethical considerations). As the third decade of this century approaches, the indispensable nature of creativity for engineers is evident; calls for developing creative and innovative engineers have been made. The 3 Edition of the Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) articulates the knowledge, skills, and attributes that civil engineers need. Creativity is central to this – the words “creative” and “creativity” appear 62 times in the 172-page document. Creativity is listed as an important professional attitude and is described as essential to innovation which itself is “an essential part of engineering.” The Structural Engineering Institute recognizes the importance of creativity and innovation and the negative consequences that the current prescriptive building and bridge codes and standards have on it. In their vision for the future of structural engineering, they describe a goal of better managing risk by returning “engineering judgment to the top of the list of reasons why structural engineers are valuable and why creative people aspire to be structural engineers.” Creative people are drawn to engineering. Troublingly, however, there is evidence that those graduating from engineering programs are less creative than those who begin. One reason for this may be the traditional focus of engineering education on specific procedures applied to wellconstrained problems in which there is a single correct answer. As Surovek and Rassati state, “focusing predominately on developing analytical skills at the expense of variable solution approaches limits the development of the divergent thinking skills needed for innovation.” Another reason may be that there is little formal creativity training within engineering curricula leaving the development of necessary skills up to chance or individual interest. As Sir Ken Robinson, an educator and expert on creativity, wrote: “Simply asking people to be creative is not enough. Children and adults need the means and the skills to be creative.” While the aspirational documents of professional engineering organizations call for creative and innovative engineers in the future, the engineers currently being educated in classrooms around the country are being developed in ways that may reduce their inherent creative abilities or drive the most creative students to study other non-engineering disciplines. Bruhl and Klosky suggested that deliberately developing creativity across an engineering curricula is necessary and will yield several positive effects: (1) encourage naturally creative students to remain in engineering, (2) help less naturally creative students improve these important skills, and (3) provide opportunities for students to experience the value that diversity plays in developing innovative solutions. This paper aims to provide useful knowledge for engineering educators who want to incorporate creativity into their courses and curricula. Artists, musicians, poets, and actors may come to mind more frequently than engineers when imagining creative people. People in these traditionally creative fields have valuable experiences to teach engineers and the educators entrusted with developing them through formal education. This paper provides insights from educating fine art students for application in engineering curricula and classrooms. One of the authors of this paper is a professor emeritus of fine art who has taught drawing, painting, printmaking, and other art courses for nearly 50 years. The other is a civil engineering associate professor who has taught engineering mechanics, structural analysis, and design courses for 7 years. This is not the first document to describe ways to develop and train engineers to be creative. In fact, there are books on this topic. Walesh’s book, written for engineering students and practitioners, describes the importance of whole-brain thinking and offers practical methods to bring creativity into the engineering design process. Engineering design textbooks often include discussions about creative processes for use in the idea generation phase of design. For example, Dieter and Schmidt offer suggestions to support creative thinking, describe barriers to creative thinking that engineers should be aware of, and provide a variety of creative thinking methods. Niku’s engineering design textbook opens with several chapters about creativity before describing the design process. In these chapters he offers a background on whole-brain thinking and provides a variety of exercises to develop creative thinking abilities. He then goes on to describe creative problem solving techniques that can be incorporated into the design process. These published texts are valuable but are not targeted at educators seeking to develop creativity skills in their undergraduate students outside of design courses. Walesh’s book comes closest but, while interesting and valuable, does not provide clear ideas for implementation within typical engineering courses. Building on the work of Sternberg and others, Cropley offers principles and strategies for incorporating the development of creativity in engineering curricula. Many of these center around the idea of providing more opportunities for students to engage in creativity throughout the curriculum. Baillie and Walker offer case studies of how creativity may be integrated into three different courses (first year mechanical engineering, materials science, and a physics seminar). Too many times in our engineering programs, we assign constrained problems and projects in our courses until the capstone design project appears at the end of the program requiring students to apply creative problem solving and develop innovative design solutions. Instead, it is vital that students have opportunities to practice and develop creative skills from the beginning of the program. Rather than giving our students projects that require them to use creative approaches and hoping they can rise to the challenge, this paper provides information and techniques to help our students develop the necessary skills to do so. Courses of study or experiences directly encouraging creative thought, at best, should precede working in historically structured courses such as engineering. Doing so will develop future engineers who will be better prepared to “think outside the box.” Innovative conclusions to otherwise conventional problems will be more easily discovered. WHAT IS CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION? Before going further it is important to explain what exactly is meant by creativity and innovation. These words are often used but definitions of them differ. Consider the concise definition of creativity put forth by Robinson: “the process of having original ideas that have value.” It is important to note that creativity requires imagination (to generate original ideas) but is more than imagination alone. As Robinson explains, “imagination can be an entirely private experience of internal consciousness ... Being creative involves doing something. It would be odd to describe as creative someone who never did anything. To call somebody creative suggests they are actively producing something in a deliberate way.” Creativity contributes to but is not synonymous with innovation. Consider the definition included in ASCE’s Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge: “innovation is a new idea, process, or device that alters societal ways of doing or being. ... It stems from creative thinking, which includes the capacity to combine or synthesize existing ideas and expertise in original ways.” Therefore, being innovative requires one to first be creative and being creative requires one to have an active imagination. From an education perspective it is important that we first encourage imagination and develop creativity in our students before expecting them to be innovative. The skills necessary to be creative can be taught and learned. Before describing specific skills, however, it is valuable to understand creativity more broadly. First, creativity is not the same as inspiration. That is, to be creative requires preparation and effort. Cropley summarized the cognitive aspects of creativity in a list: 1. Possession of a fund of general knowledge 2. Knowledge of one or more special fields