Creativity in Engineering: Novel Solutions to Complex Problems

series.

Preface

David H. Cropley, Adelaide

The Approach of This Book

This book provides a set of research-based concepts, firmly grounded in the body of knowledge of creativity, which will help professional engineers, engineering managers, and engineering educators to understand creativity in a systematic way. The material in the book will help these stakeholders to identify its key aspects, develop it in themselves, foster its development in students and professionals, and acknowledge and reward it appropriately. The aim is

• to demystify the concept of creativity, i.e., help educators, managers, practitioners and students understand it in a practical, concrete way;

• to show that there is a common core to creativity in all disciplines;

• to help people acquire a foundation of creative skills, motives, attitudes, and values from the very beginning;

• to show educators and managers how to facilitate the development of these through their leadership;

• to show educators and managers how to evaluate other people’s work in ways that foster creativity.

The approach to creativity in this book emphasizes three complementary facets:

1. the thinking skills and strategies people need for creativity (cognitive factors);

2. the personal and motivational properties that permit and activate these skills and strategies (noncognitive factors);

3. the characteristics of the environment (social and organizational factors) that influence the whole process.

Why is This Book Different?

Much of what has been written about creativity in the domain of engineering is unsatisfactory. There is no shortage of books and articles that teach readers cognitive tricks. These approaches, however, are overly dependent on the reapplication of factual knowledge, often in the form of catchy, fixed techniques. They fail to encourage deep learning and fail to move beyond developing a knowledge of what and how by adding knowledge of when and why. This shallow approach to understanding leaves learners able to execute simple procedures and describe superficial concepts, but far less able to compare and contrast different approaches, analyze underlying causes, and reapply their knowledge to new and unfamiliar situations. By definition, creativity in engineering is about dealing with new and unprecedented problems. An overreliance on the reapplication of tried and trusted methods leaves learners unable to answer questions such as why didn’t this method work in this particular case? or what method is best suited to this particular group of people? The shallow, factual-only approach has been characterized as fast food creativity (A. J. Cropley & Cropley, 2009). This book therefore advocates spinach creativity: a more complete approach that does not shy away from those aspects that are less glamorous and less readily digested.

Most people are familiar with Thomas Edison’s famous quote: Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration (published in Harper’s magazine in 1932). The same, broadly speaking, may be said of creativity. Perhaps a better simile is that creativity is like an iceberg—the end result, in the form of a brilliant new idea, or a novel solution to an intractable problem, is only 10% the whole effort. The other 90% is the complex interplay of personal properties, feelings, motivation, cognitive processes, organizational and social factors that deliver the visible product. If we are to get the best possible result from our creative engineering efforts, we must understand not only the visible tip of the iceberg, but also everything that lies hidden beneath.

Outline of Chapters

The focus of the following chapters of this book is therefore, fundamentally, to address the question of how to reconnect creativity and engineering. Before embarking on a detailed explanation of the 4Ps of creativity, what they are, and how they are measured, I will begin by fleshing out two issues already mentioned briefly as important for understanding creativity in engineering. Chapter 2 first tackles the question of the importance of creativity in engineering. Why should engineering organizations, their leadership, and their professional practitioners, as well as educational institutions, be concerned with creativity in engineering? What is it that engineers do that requires creativity? What value does creativity add to products? Also, how does creativity feed the wider process of innovation?

In Chapter 3, I then begin the detailed development of the framework for understanding creativity (and innovation) in engineering by looking at the Phases involved in both engineering design and creativity. What are they, and how do they differ in terms of what is required? One consequence of this will be that creativity is recognized as not being a one-size-fits-all activity. This chapter will also show that engineering design and a generic characterization of the phases of creativity bear a close correspondence. The phase model developed also introduces the idea of paradoxes that will be examined in detail in each subsequent chapter.

Chapter 4 begins the process of examining the 4Ps in some detail. I will begin by looking at the desired outcome of the creative engineering activity—the Product. What are the things that are created (products, processes, systems, services), and what qualities do these possess (or need to possess) to be regarded as creative? What value do these qualities add to the product and how does that set a creative product apart from one that is not creative?

Chapter 5 studies Process in the sense of the cognitive processes that are used in the creation of technological solutions. In particular, this tackles how ideas are generated, and how both divergent and convergent thinking processes are achieved in the context of engineering creativity.

Chapter 6 tackles the personal, psychological aspects of creativity and innovation. What are the feelings, personal properties, and motivational factors that can foster or hinder creativity?

Chapter 7 addresses the role of the organizational and social environments and creativity. This Press can exert an influence on creativity in a variety of ways: it defines what is creative, who is creative, and the amount and kind of creativity that society can tolerate. The Press also plays an important role in assisting or resisting creativity.

Chapter 8 examines creativity in the wider context of innovation. How do they differ across the phases of the creativity and innovation? I will also discuss wider issues such as competition, and how this impacts on the transition from novel idea to acclaimed product. This chapter also examines ways that the innovative capacity of organizations can be diagnosed.

Chapter 9 starts the process of looking at educational issues and creativity by studying creativity training (as distinct from education in a university context). This chapter will look at the evidence for and against creativity training, and apply these particularly to the case of professional engineering activities.

Chapter 10 draws the book to a close by examining more specifically how creativity can, and should, be embedded in engineering education. Among the issues facing engineering educators is a general reluctance to give up anything in the engineering curriculum, meaning that creativity, if it is included at all, is usually tacked on in a piecemeal fashion, rather than being built into engineering programs in a systematic, top-down manner.

Acknowledgments

Sir Isaac Newton once wrote to his fellow natural philosopher Robert Hooke If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.¹ I am very fortunate, as a researcher and author in the field of creativity, to have been the beneficiary of a number of willing sets of shoulders. As you will discover in this book, the discipline of creativity has its home largely in the field of psychology, where it has grown to maturity over some 60 years. The shoulders that I have stood on, and the sights I have seen, have been supplied by eminent scholars in the field of psychology. Not only have they allowed me to stand on their shoulders, but also they have generously admitted me to their domain, and patiently tutored me, despite my non-psychological background. If I have contributed to the field, I hope it is, principally, to show that creativity plays an enormously important role in engineering, and that engineers must familiarize themselves with it. I also hope that I have shown that the psychological foundations of creativity are not mysterious and incomprehensible, but are open and accessible to engineers. Having said that, I think the best solution for engineers concerned with recognizing, developing, and fostering creativity is to work closely with psychologists, drawing on the complementary strengths of the two disciplines.

The most important giant I need to thank is Emeritus Professor Arthur Cropley of the University of Hamburg. Arthur is an educational psychologist and he began working in the field of creativity more than 50 years ago. He therefore joined the field in its pioneering days, and has an unrivaled knowledge and perspective of how it has developed from infancy to maturity. He, more than anyone, is responsible for my entry to the field, and this book reflects his knowledge and expertise as much as my own. When I was writing about the Sputnik Shock of October 1957 (see Chapter 1) and its impact on creativity, it was invaluable to be able to talk to someone like Arthur, who not only lived through that time, but also remembers standing on a street corner, listening to a portable radio tuned to Sputnik’s beeps. He is also my father.

The next giant I need to acknowledge is Professor James Kaufman of the University of Connecticut. James first contacted me in about 2003, asking me to contribute a chapter on engineering creativity to a book he was editing. My first response was to email him asking if he had the right Cropley! I thought that perhaps he had confused me with the real creativity researching Cropley, namely Arthur! James, however, assured me that he had not made a mistake. It is thanks to James, and his willing collaboration, that I have had the opportunity to immerse myself in a creativity research environment, through many visits to his lab, first in California, and more recently in Connecticut. It is also through James that I have come to know, and collaborate with, the much wider community of creativity researchers in psychology.

The third giant I would like to thank is Professor Mark Runco of the University of Georgia. Mark is another preeminent scholar of creativity with a long and distinguished record of research in the field. I have been fortunate to be able to interact with him on many occasions and have benefited immensely from his knowledge and insight.

There are many others in this field—psychologists and engineers—with whom I have crossed paths, collaborated, and exchanged ideas. I don’t know if it is a characteristic of creativity researchers, or of psychologists, or simply luck on my part, but all of the people I have interacted with in this field have been open, generous, helpful, and friendly. It is always a pleasure to work with them, and makes for a varied and stimulating career. I thank all those other researchers and thinkers who have given generously of their time and intelligence and look forward to many more years of fruitful collaboration in this fascinating area.

Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Melissa (another psychologist!), and my children, Matthew, Dana, and Daniel. They have all made contributions to my understanding of creativity, not only through their moral support, but also through their creative examples in acting, filmmaking, singing, writing, and art. They live creativity—I just write about it.

May 2014

¹Letter from Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1676, as transcribed in Jean-Pierre Maury (1992) Newton: Understanding the Cosmos, New Horizons.

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 21st 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, 21st 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 21st 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 21st 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 21st century life. There is widespread agreement that creativity is a vital component in the success and prosperity of organizations. Yet, despite this, it is also clear that many leaders, managers, professional practitioners, and educators, not least in the field of engineering, are either apathetic to creativity or, while theoretically aware of its importance, uncertain of how to foster and exploit it in practice. This situation is by no means unique to engineering, and is typically simply the result of a lack of practical understanding of what creativity is, of how it can add value to the solution of real problems, and of what needs to be done to foster it. This in turn results from the fact that creativity is frequently conceptualized too broadly as a general, all-or-nothing property—you either have it, or you don’t—and at the same time too narrowly, as mainly to do with aesthetics—creativity is about art, isn’t it? Creativity is also regarded too narrowly as simply a matter of thinking and especially free and unconstrained thinking. Benson (2004), for example, describes anecdotal evidence suggesting that primary school teachers think that creativity is simply a matter of letting children do their own thing (p. 138) and that creativity, at its core, is developed mainly through art and music (p. 138). Other researchers have found similar conceptual roadblocks. Kawenski (1991), for example, writing about students in an apparel design course, found that In the first place, their romantic notions led them to believe that creative thinking consisted of just letting their minds waft about dreamily, waiting for the muse to strike them. (p. 263).

The result of this is that creativity is often associated with lack of rigor, impulsive behavior, free expression of ideas without regard to quality, and similar soft factors. Things, also, which hard-nosed engineers disdain as "not real engineering." Nothing could be further from the truth, especially in the field of engineering, where the focus is on solving practical problems and satisfying customer needs.

In recent years, it seems as though there is no cross-fertilization and sharing of ideas taking place. What is even more interesting is that in the years immediately after the Sputnik Shock, there was a strong connection between creativity (and its psychological foundations) and engineering. Buhl (1960) epitomizes this, but also draws attention to the fact that this cross-fertilization seemed to fade away, so that from the 1970s onwards the connections between creativity and engineering were lost. It may be that engineering, in relation to creativity, was a victim of its own success. By the end of the 1960s, the achievements of the Apollo Space Program may have engendered a feeling among engineers in the United States, as well as other Western countries, that the issues identified by the Sputnik Shock, a decade earlier, had been solved. U.S. and Western engineers had comprehensively demonstrated their prowess, and we could stop worrying about creativity in engineering! Nevertheless, in early 21st century engineering, the challenge remains. We know creativity is important to engineering, but we struggle to understand why or how, and often therefore, the role of creativity is ignored.

At the same time that engineers forgot about creativity, another factor was conspiring to make it harder to reestablish the connection. As the study of creativity grew within the field of psychology, a gradual shift in our understanding of the term creativity took place. Creativity became tied strongly to the arts (D. H. Cropley & Cropley, 2013) in the public eye (pp. 12–13), and this contributed to the difficulty of reconnecting creativity to engineering. Any manager or teacher working in engineering, and interested in creativity, must now actively unhook creativity from the arts (McWilliam, Dawson, & Tan, 2011) before he or she can absorb the wealth of material that is available on the