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

工程师经常遇到问题，必须从过去的经验中吸取教训来解决问题。一个人的经历越多，他的想法就越多。此外，不同经验的工程师可能会产生不同类型的想法。该奖项将开发一种方法来衡量设计师的经验，以预测他或她为问题提供创造性解决方案的能力。这种对创新过程的新理解将使教师能够理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，从而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方式，让他们了解自己在创造性思维方面的优势，以及如何变得更具创新性。最后，该奖项将使项目经理能够战略性地创建不同的问题解决者团队，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。本研究将从心理学的角度和工程设计的角度来衡量个人创造力的一个方面，即自发的灵活性。心理学视角关注个人的经验和发现问题的能力，而工程设计视角关注个人解决问题的能力。这两种观点之间的统计相关性将有助于了解个人在面对解决问题的任务时发现问题的能力的价值。假设当个体执行这些发现问题或解决问题的任务时，他们从相同的人工功能和形式之间的关系的认知网络中提取。本文将建立一个认知模型，以弥合心理学家对自发灵活性的看法与在工程设计中的应用之间的差距，并隔离自发灵活性在工程设计中经常遇到的问题解决任务中的作用。自发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。该实验设计和严格的数据分析技术将使统计变异性的很大一部分得到解释，为自发灵活性在工程设计中的作用提供新的见解和应用。对工程专业学生和人口统计信息的纵向研究进行统计分析，将有助于了解学生在攻读工程学位期间如何培养创造力，以及学生的背景和经历如何与他们自发的灵活性相关。

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.