Supporting Creativity in Engineering Design: A Position Paper - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 18

These examples just shall give hints that there is not only one kind of creativity,
but that the specific kind of creativity required is depending on the specific
situation. Measurement of creativity should be compared with measurement of
thinking in general!
2.2.3 Mechanisms of Creativity
A more important question is, if the points of evaluation help us in understanding
the mechanisms of creativity. There are a lot of definitions; there is a lot of literature
with origin in scientific research, consultancy and others.
There are a number of different theories about creativity available, which try to
explain at least specific details or aspects of creativity. But still we have no proved
way of teaching and training of creativity—and we are not sure that these measures
are possible at all.
A critical voice, W. Erharter, came up in 2012 with a book claiming that there is
no creativity at all (Erharter 2012 ) . In his book the author addresses different kinds
of creativity like an individual characteristic, a capability, and a kind of behaviour,
a problem solving technique, a kind of childish fantasy, a basis for innovation and
others. Erharter seems to be a little bit provoking, but at the end he is talking about
generating/creating solutions based on basic mental processes.
It seems that there are some basic mechanisms to support creating new things,
we may call it creativity. Following the discussion up to now it seems that there
may be different kinds of creativity and different ways of supporting these.
Based on experience we can state that there are proved ways of reducing and
avoiding creativity by education or culture. Preventing children from doing some
creative things or even punishing them if they start to be creative will have long
term negative impact. Establishing a company-culture attacking individual moti-
vation, punishing all failures, working without a clear set of rules way etc. will
eliminate any creative spirit.
2.3 Engineering Design
In engineering design processes we have to create results, solutions, products. And
there are usually a large number of targets, requirements, constraints etc. we have to
keep in mind. This may be compared with navigation in a jungle with only limited
infrastructure and lack of overview and insights.
First of all we have to identify the area of problems/demands we should work
on. In this phase we have to cooperate with colleagues from strategy, product
management, marketing etc. Having done this we have to elaborate the require-
ments, functions, constraints etc. of the future solutions/products. Here we have to
have the “right” ideas for a successful realisation in future.