Supporting Creativity in Engineering Design: A Position Paper - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 16

specific project. And similar is the point of post-design. As long as products are on
the market and used by customers engineering design at least has the obligation to
observe the products in the sense of preventing risk.
Post-design may also be understood as the beginning of Pre-design of the next
product generation including improvements, new and additional features,

addressing additional market segments and so forth.
Engineering design has to play an active role in the whole range of phases from
society to society!
Engineering design has to provide (new) solutions/products to the markets and to
the society. Based on these points engineering design is fulfilling its role within the
supplier-network to generate sales and profit.
Creativity is discussed as one of the important drivers of improving solutions/
products and generating new solutions/products. But creativity is also required to
set the “right” goals and requirements, to find potentials for cost reduction, to solve
problems regarding reliability, to organize engineering processes etc. It seems that
there have to be different categories of creativity.

2.2 Creativity

There is a lot of literature dealing with creativity; but do we really understand what
creativity is about?

2.2.1 Support Creativity

Higgins ( 1994 ) in his book about Creative Problem Solving stated that for him
Brainstorming is one of the most successful methods fostering creativity. Other
authors like Furnham ( 2000 ) come to a completely different result.
The author discussed this matter with a number of consultants working in
the field of creative problem solving. Most of them stated that brainstorming should
be seen as one of the weakest creativity supporting methods. Talking with practi-
tioners and observing them during daily business brainstorming seems to be
pervasive in industry.
Confronted with this situation the author discussed the contradiction of often
used vs. lack of efficiency with a senior colleague in psychology. At the end of this
discussion we agreed on a list of numerous steps and actions to be processed for a
successful and efficient process of supporting creativity. But still there are doubts
that group processes are really helpful in generating ideas.
After discussing only one of a large number of critical examples for supporting
creativity it seems absolutely necessary to develop a much better understanding
of creativity!