THE IMPACT OF DESIGN METHODS ON THE CREATIVITY OF 1ST-YEAR ENGINEERING STUDENT PROJECTS: THE CASE OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING
Year: 2015
Editor: Christian Weber, Stephan Husung, Gaetano Cascini, Marco CantaMESsa, Dorian Marjanovic, Francesca Montagna
Author: Beghelli, Alejandra; Prieto, Pablo
Series: ICED
Institution: 1: Faculty of Engineering & Sciences, Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, Chile; 2: Product Design Engineering Dept., Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Chile
Section: Innovation and Creativity
Page(s): 279-288
ISBN: 978-1-904670-71-1
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
Engineers able to produce creative products are very much required everywhere. However, classical engineering courses especially the courses of the first two years of the career- tend to be content-intensive, focused on technical skills, with little space to foster creativity. As a result, when faced with the requirement of devising a creative product, engineering students often are unprepared to do so. In this paper we show that the introduction of design methods into the 1st-year engineering course of Computer Programming significantly improved the novelty of final-term projects. Each design-method was selected according to the stage of the creative process the course was going through: preparation, incubation, illumination or verification. Our hypothesis is that by blending design and engineering teaching with enough time to go through the creative process, novel ideas emerge more fluently. In this paper we provide a weekly description of the course activities and the results obtained. We expect this work helps to re-design some engineering courses towards a more design-engineering blended teaching to trigger creative thinking.
Keywords: Creativity, Engineering Education, Design Methods, User Centred Design