RUI: Understanding How Engineers Draw from their Knowledge and Experience to Solve Design Problems Creatively

RUI：了解工程师如何利用他们的知识和经验创造性地解决设计问题

• 批准号: 1538077
• 负责人: Benjamin Caldwell
• 金额: $ 29.98万
• 依托单位: LeTourneau University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-09-01 至 2019-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1538077&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RUI; Understanding; How; Engineers; Draw

Engineers regularly face problems and must draw from past experiences to solve them. The more experiences a person has, the more ideas they are able to develop. Further, engineers with different experiences may develop different types of ideas. This award will develop a way to measure the experiences of a designer in order to predict his or her ability to generate creative solutions to a problem. This new understanding of the creative process will enable teachers to understand how engineers gain experience and use that experience to generate high-quality ideas, improving the ability of educators in the United States to teach creativity and innovation in the classroom. This award will also provide a way for individuals to understand their own strengths in creative thinking and ways in which they can become more innovative. Finally, this award will enable project managers to strategically create diverse teams of problem-solvers to maximize the types and quality of ideas developed in a team's problem-solving process.This research will measure an aspect of individual creativity, spontaneous flexibility, from a psychology perspective and an engineering design perspective. The psychology perspective focuses on an individual's experience and problem-finding ability, while the engineering design perspective focuses on the individual's problem-solving ability. Statistical correlations between these two perspectives will provide insights into the value of an individual's problem-finding abilities when faced with problem-solving tasks. It is hypothesized that when individuals perform these problem-finding or problem-solving tasks, they draw from the same cognitive network of relationships between artifact functions and forms. A cognitive model will be developed to bridge the gap between psychologists' view of spontaneous flexibility and applications in engineering design and to isolate the role spontaneous flexibility serves to enhance problem-solving tasks often encountered in engineering design. Spontaneous flexibility will be measured multiple times from both the psychology and design perspectives, providing repeated measures of the individual's spontaneous flexibility. This experiment design and the rigorous data analysis techniques will enable a large portion of the statistical variability to be accounted for, providing new insights and applications of the role spontaneous flexibility serves in engineering design. Statistical analyses of a longitudinal study of engineering students and demographic information will provide an understanding of how students grow in their creativity during their engineering degree and how students' background and experiences are related to their spontaneous flexibility.

工程师经常面临问题，必须从过去的经验中吸取教训来解决问题。一个人拥有的经验越多，他们能够产生的想法就越多。此外，具有不同经验的工程师可能会开发出不同类型的想法。该奖项将开发一种方法来衡量设计师的经验，以预测他或她产生创造性解决问题的能力。这种对创造过程的新理解将使教师能够了解工程师如何获得经验，并利用这些经验产生高质量的想法，提高美国教育工作者在课堂上教授创造力和创新的能力。该奖项还将为个人提供一种了解自己在创造性思维方面的优势以及他们可以变得更具创新性的方式的方法。最后，该奖项将使项目经理能够战略性地创建多样化的问题解决团队，以最大限度地提高团队解决问题过程中开发的想法的类型和质量。这项研究将从心理学角度和工程设计角度衡量个人创造力，自发灵活性的一个方面。心理学的观点侧重于个人的经验和发现问题的能力，而工程设计的观点侧重于个人的解决问题的能力。这两个角度之间的统计相关性将提供洞察个人的问题发现能力的价值时，面对解决问题的任务。据推测，当个人执行这些发现问题或解决问题的任务，他们从相同的认知网络之间的关系，人工制品的功能和形式。将开发一个认知模型，以弥合心理学家对自发灵活性的看法与工程设计中的应用之间的差距，并隔离自发灵活性的作用，以增强工程设计中经常遇到的解决问题的任务。自发的灵活性将从心理学和设计的角度进行多次测量，提供对个人自发灵活性的重复测量。这种实验设计和严格的数据分析技术将使很大一部分的统计变异被占，提供新的见解和应用的作用自发的灵活性在工程设计中。工程专业学生和人口统计信息的纵向研究的统计分析将提供学生如何在他们的工程学位，以及学生的背景和经验是如何与他们的自发的灵活性在他们的创造力增长的理解。