WORK IN PROGRESS: Design, Creativity, and Creativity Techniques: Finding, Encouraging, and Developing the 'Voice of the Designer'

Design courses commonly discuss the importance of the voice of the customer and the voice of the product in the design process but the voice of the designer is often absent from the process. This is in contrast to the way that the vision and creativity of famous designers (e.g. Steve Jobs, Burt Rutan, Dean Kamen, etc.) are admired and celebrated. How do we help students to develop their creativity and incorporate their voice into the process? How can we also help them to improve the quality of the ideas that they inject into the design process? A course in creativity and creativity techniques was developed as a prototype to test creativity teaching techniques for subsequent incorporation into a capstone design sequence. The primary creativity mechanism was to utilize art both as a prism for new ways of seeing and as a vehicle to explore design in collaboration with the Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Students in this course explored techniques to help them find their creative core and ways to use art as a prism to see engineering design from multiple perspectives. To achieve these learning goals and to free students from potential self-limiting behaviors in discussing non-technical matters, role-playing as part of a popular role-playing game was utilized to enable students to approach creativity and creativity techniques from their character’s perspective.