EMBEDDING CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

IN THE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM

Professor Dennis McKeag

School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, University of Ulster at Jordanstown,

Shore Road, Newtownabbey, BT37 0QB. (). Tel: +44 02890 368599.

Fax: +44 02890 368580.

ABSTRACT

One of the challenges facing engineering faculties is the matter of embedding creativity and innovation into undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Creativity is perceived to be the domain of the arts, and the general understanding of innovation is any change. In industrialised society people expect originality, ingenuity and novelty from new or improved products processes and systems, and these factors are the basis of creativity. It follows that since most of products, processes and systems in industrialised society are based on engineering and associated technology, it is imperative that these values are an integral part of engineering education, and that innovation, which is the commercialisation of creative design, is also taught as a fundamental element in the education of an engineer. Having spent fifteen years as a professor in a Faculty of Art and Design and subsequently transferred to a Faculty of Engineering, the author has developed a well tried and tested system for embedding creativity and innovation in engineering courses, and this paper provides insight into the system and its success.

KEYWORDS:engineering; creativity; innovation; education, industry

1.Background

In much of the western world in the mid to late twentieth century engineering in universities was perceived to be an academic discipline requiring a sound knowledge of mathematics and relevant sciences. When graduates from programmes made their way into employment they had to learn to be engineers. In the relatively uncompetitive world of the nineteen fifties and sixties employers could afford the luxury of training graduates for a protracted period in the hope they would eventually become valuable to the business. In any event manufacturing companies adhered to traditional practices in both design and manufacture. Product development was a slow process and change was rarely radical, and of course the customers would always be there.

This perception was put to test from the seventies onwards, with the emergence of Japan as a world industrial power. Japan produced products that were well designed and manufactured to the highest standards of quality, and their problem was one of satisfying demand. European and American businesses lost out in the head to head competition. Certainly in the UK There was a realisation that something was wrong with our engineering and in particular our engineering education, but what? Engineering had been responsible for the industrial revolution, and people such as Robert Stevenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunnel and Thomas Edison championed this revolution. Engineers such as these had a sound and ever developing knowledge and understanding of their subject. They had good problem solving skills, could design and lead design and manufacture teams. They were certainly creative and innovative.

Various initiatives have been taken since the nineteen seventies to address weaknesses in the taught engineering undergraduate programmes. These have incorporated more design, more business more management etc. Often this has simply resulted in engineering courses that have moved away from the traditional values of engineering undergraduate courses based on science and mathematics, towards courses based on vocational skills such as detail drawing, and administration, masquerading under titles such as product design and engineering management. Industrialists realise that the engineering leaders of tomorrow cannot come from courses such as these. There is a realisation that engineering by tradition has been a creative and innovative activity and the need is to instil these values, exhibited by people such as Stevenson, Carlson and Edison, into engineering courses whilst retaining the requirements of mathematics, engineering science and abstract modelling; knowledge and skills so necessary as the basis for design and development of today’s complex high technology products and systems on which our modern world depends.

Educationalists and government in the industrialised nations are struggling with the problem of how to get creativity and innovation into the engineering curriculum (1)(2)(3). At a recent seminar/workshop attended by the author recently (4), it became apparent that the “experts” had problems understanding what creativity and innovation are, and rather than guiding the audience, the speakers were searching for solutions. It is this experience that prompted the writing of this paper, and hence put into the public domain something the author has been successfully practicing for many years.

Engineering, industrial design and (fine) craft design are the roots of all the design based professions in the context of product, and this article will focus on creativity and innovation in this context, although the concept expounded is equally relevant to other design based professions such as software engineering and architecture.

Before embarking on how to teach creativity and innovation in the context of engineering programmes it is worthwhile reflecting on what creativity and innovation are, and what these terms mean (or should mean) to engineers.

Create generally means to make something (out of nothing), and is associated with being original, novel, expressive and imaginative(5). In terms of engineering creativity can be said to embrace these terms and have value to the client or customer. Innovation can embrace creativity in that it in the context of engineering it is generally accepted as the commercialisation of ideas that are the result of creative thought. It follows that anything that is innovative should be a candidate for intellectual property protection.

The problem about discussing creativity and innovation is that if a group of individuals are asked to define these terms, there will be as many definitions as there are persons in the group. The reason is that these are non-verbal activities. In the traditional engineering sense, or perhaps to be more correct the scientific sense, if the same group of individuals were asked to define Newton’s laws of motion, Ohm’s law or Kirchhoff’s law, provided they knew and remembered what they had previously learned, all would give the same answer. The reason is that these are verbal activities and hence can be defined. This difference between verbal subjects and non-verbal subjects to a large extent explains the reason why engineering academics are keen to teach verbal subjects to the exclusion of the non-verbal.

By way of illustration, as a young lecturer engaged in teaching design to second year industrial design students almost forty years ago, I set the class an exercise in design of an electric kettle, a fairly standard exercise for such students. At a time when electric kettles had a broad round base, were as tall as they were broad, had a handle across the top, and a pouring spout opposite the industry standard electrical connection. One student designed what we now call a “jug” kettle. In assessing it I commented critically on the need for a non standard heating element to fit the small base, the fact the base was small meant that the product would be unstable, and with the handle on the side instead of at the top, the product had poor ergonomics. The student got 54% for effort but in academic terms I was not impressed. Roll on a few years and Jug kettles had taken over the world. Clearly on reflection the student had produced a unique design that was capable of widespread commercialisation, creativity was inherent and for my part I should have been ushering that student off to the nearest patent office! It is now obvious that I should have applied assessment criteria that went beyond cold metrics.

So this raises the questions, “how can we recognise creativity”? “how can we teach it? and how can we incorporate it into our courses?

2.Observation

It is apparent from how the terms are used in the public domain that creativity is associated with something that is “a bit different” and innovation is taken as any change no matter how trivial. It follows that the first thing we need to teach students is how to recognise creativity and innovation in general and also in the context of their chosen profession. In a historical sense observing creativity and innovation in the context of engineering is easy, we have so many icons to choose from. Examples are Robert Stephenson and his steam locomotive, Thomas Edison and his telephone or Chester Carlson and his Xerox machine. We can look at people such as these and what they achieved, we can see that they were creative individuals, they developed creative products that were truly innovative. However following the industrial revolution something went wrong, the creative spirit seemed to dry up as engineering became sanitised, respectable, and was introduced as a taught university subject. As suggested in the previous section, academics find it easier to assess verbal subjects where there are the firm foundations of metrics, science and mathematics to support their knowledge, and it is probably for these reasons that the subjective and qualitative material that is the basis of the non verbal activities such as creativity, design and innovation were largely ignored or lip service paid to them. At this point I feel it is appropriate to quote from an article by Jeremy Clarkson (6):

“In two million years man managed to discover only three important things: fire, the fact that wood floats and the horse. Then within 100 years he came up with everything else. Railways, cars, aeroplanes, antibiotics, electricity, the telephone, the computer, photography……but then we arrived in about 1920 and everything just stopped. Mobile phones, the word processor, the Eurofighter. They are all just developments of ideas that came along in the nineteenth century.”

Although not strictly true, it is easy to empathise with this view. Engineers are no longer perceived as being creative or innovative. Today engineers do not invent cars they fix cars, we do not invent railway engines we drive them, we do not invent the Xerox machine we service it, or at least that is the public perception. But is this perception unfounded, can our graduates recognise creativity? Are they creative? Do they have the skills necessary to commercialise creative ideas? Will you teach them what they need to know? Clearly we need space in our curriculum where students can be taught the history of engineering with particular emphasis on the radical innovations, the people and the creativity behind these innovations, and the science and technology underpinning their realisation. By putting this historical knowledge together in context, students will see the value and relevance of their course material, realise that innovation is the work of creative individuals, and begin to recognise creativity and innovation in every day life.

This brings us to the second part of this approach, what concepts, theories, skills, techniques, knowledge and information to students need to underpin their creative and innovative activity?

3.Knowledge, Cognitive and Practical skills

This area can be divided into two sections, generic knowledge and skills, and subject specific knowledge and skills, although there is no clear distinction between the two. It is generally accepted that there is a “body” of creativity approaches and techniques that can be used by virtually everyone. Perhaps the universal creativity technique is brainstorming, or perhaps more accurately brain writing. Usually when individuals want to engage in creativity this is what they do and little else. However there are many other techniques and approaches and these include morphological analysis, forced connections, new combinations (these three together are a good combination), checklist, performance specification (chapter 3 of Total Design is a good source for this one)(7), and interaction matrix. Basically look up any good design book and a number of such techniques will be included. Some techniques are more suited to different phases in the innovation process, for example exploration of the problem, generation of ideas, or selection of concept. Some are better suited to systems design, some to product level design and others to design of components. Some textbooks give guidance but students will soon find out through practice what techniques or approaches to use and when.

In more recent years user centred design tools has came to the fore in respect of creativity and innovation. The theory is that if products (processes or systems) are designed around the user experience then the product will experience greater market penetration, it will be more intuitive and easier to use, and fewer mistakes will be made. A good source of user centred design techniques is The Design Council web site (8). Quite a few theory articles and articles relating to creativity approaches tools and techniques can be found on this site. Some of my favourites are scenarios, role-play, immersive experience, shadowing, drama, as well as the established favourites of user trips and user research. Many of these techniques require team participation and there is no better way of getting a team to gel than having them create and act out a five-minute drama based on the problem in hand, or create scenarios and analyse them, or play the role of customers in for example the product life cycle etc.

One example of creativity techniques at work involved the “five whys” and “immersion”. We were engaged in the design of a new precinct sweeper (Figure 1). The market leaders are Johnston and Schmidt. The company NC Engineering wished to diversify into this new market area. To get into the market required that the NC Engineering machine should be “better” than the opposition and ideally have a unique selling point that had value to the customer (A relative advantage based on Rogers Criteria for successful Product Innovation (9)). In one team discussions between the academics and the company the hopper became the focus of attention together with the water jet spray and suction system. In the dominant design of precinct sweepers there is a tank for water and a hopper for debris. In dry days perhaps around 200 litres of water is carried in the water tank and this is sprayed ahead of the rotary sweeping brushes at the front of the precinct sweeper. The brushes sweep the debris into the path to the vacuum that sucks it into the hopper. Of course the water is also sucked into the hopper, and it passes out through a filter and falls into the water tank to be re-circulated. Under discussion was the problem of optimising the size of the hopper and the size of the water tank. It was deemed desirable that the good relative advantage would be to have the biggest hopper on the market for that class of vehicle. However no matter how hard the engineers worked on design and associated calculations this objective was not possible within the constraints of the required water carrying capacity. By asking why two tanks were necessary and following through the creative experience to its ultimate conclusion, we realised that the water tank could be dispensed with altogether by simply using the hopper to store the water in the first place (combination, one of the tools of associative thinking). This meant we met the objective of the biggest hopper on the market and by default, the biggest water container! Re-cycled water was now simply drawn out of the base of the hopper through a filter. A patent application was prepared in support of this invention.

As can be seen, this engineered product met the criteria for creativity (original, novel, valuable to the customer), and it was innovative (intellectual property and it was commercialised).

This case study example identifies the need for the study of concepts in engineering activity. Rogers Criteria for successful product innovation is mentioned, but others include Rothwell's criteria for successful industrial innovation, the marketing mix (or four P’s), the Ansoff’s Matrix and many others. Concepts help us to understand how creativity and innovation has been successful in the past, and we can be reasonably assured that if we adopt such concepts at relevant stages of our work then we also stand a good chance of being successful.

Basic skills required of an engineer are drawing and modelling. In the past the drawing skills were predominantly the generation of formal orthographic and isometric drawings. Today the CAD systems have largely replaced formal drawing skills and can do so much more. For example three-dimensional visualisation, dynamic computer models, downloading computer files to a rapid prototype machine to produce realistic models etc. The computer can also undertake calculations to verify the integrity of the design under consideration. Mathematics and science as applied in engineering are a form of abstract modelling and in theory form the basis of all engineering activity. In reality mathematics and science are used as an occasional check in most industries to ascertain that the design is fit for purpose. Unfortunately in engineering education academics generally provide the students with a situation already modelled and students are expected to calculate the right answer. In engineering practice the problem has to be modelled then calculations performed. Of course a reserve (or safety) factor is always added, ranging from around 50% for class 1 structures in aircraft design to perhaps 2000% for some civil engineering structures. The lesson here is that engineering students have to learn to model situations, but once having generated the model a ballpark analysis will generally suffice.