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

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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.