CREATIVITY “MISRULES”

First Year Engineering Students’ Production &Perception of Creativity in Design Ideas

Colin M. Gray1, Seda Yilmaz1, Shanna R. Daly2,Colleen M. Seifert2, & Richard Gonzalez2

1 IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY 2 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

CREATIVITY & ENGINEERING

• Increase in design activities for first-year engineering students (Dym & Little, 2004; Ogot & Okudan, 2006)

• Pedagogical tools and strategies have been developed to increase creative potential (Dym et al., 2005; Tolbert & Daly, 2013)

Specific barriers students face in learning how to be creative are unclear (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Tolbert & Daly, 2013)

KNOWN BARRIERS

• Fixation as one diagnostic outcome of the lack of creative ability (Purcell & Gero, 1996)

• Tools can be used to effectively discourage fixation and increase capability (Daly et al., 2010; Smith & Linsey, 2011; Smith, Linsey, & Kerne, 2011)

• Inaccurate beliefs about creativity slow the development of creative ability

“MISRULES”

• Inaccurate beliefs have been studied in other educational domains as “bugs” or “misrules” (Brown & VanLehn, 1980; Engelmann, 1993)

• Such beliefs are deeply held, and difficult to document or change without deep knowledge of how beliefs are built and systemically altered (Carnine & Becker, 2010)

We are assuming that students’ tacit biases about creativity shape their labeling of designs as “creative,” and may serve as a barrier to their creation and recognition of truly novel and useful concepts

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1. Where do first-year engineering students identify their “most creative” idea in an idea generation activity, when compared with all generated concepts?

2. What characterizes the relationship between a participant’s espoused belief about creativity and their ordering of creative concepts?

3. Does Design Heuristics as a pedagogical tool have an impact on the student’s perception of a concept’s creativity?

DESIGN HEURISTICS

DESIGN HEURISTICS

Provides prompts to help designers generate

alternatives that vary in nature, discouraging fixation and encouraging divergent

patterns of thinking

(Yilmaz, Daly, Seifert, & Gonzalez, 2011; Yilmaz, Seifert, & Gonzalez,

2010)

Derived from empirical evidence of industrial and

engineering designs

(Daly et al., 2012; Yilmaz, Christian, Daly, Seifert, & Gonzalez, 2012;

Yilmaz & Seifert, 2010)

Validated through a range of product analysis, case studies, and protocol

analyses, in both educational &

professional contexts

(e.g., Yilmaz & Seifert, 2009; Yilmaz et al., 2011; Yilmaz et al., 2010; Yilmaz et al., 2013; Yilmaz, Daly, Christian,

Seifert, & Gonzalez, 2014)

METHOD

• 156 first-year engineering students• Two-day design-build-test activity prior to

matriculation at a large research university• 85-minute idea generation session, using

brainstorming and Design Heuristics methods• Survey on beliefs about creativity,

ranking their concepts from most to least creative

EXPERIMENTAL CONDITIONS

DESIGN PROBLEMbike rack

FIXATION SOURCEexisting solution

DESIGN PROBLEMbike rack

FIXATION SOURCEself-generated solution

DESIGN PROBLEMspill-proof coffee cup

FIXATION SOURCEexisting solution

DESIGN PROBLEMspill-proof coffee cup

FIXATION SOURCEself-generated solution

IDEATION SESSION

BRAINSTORMING

30 MINUTES

DESIGN HEURISTICS

30 MINUTES

Generate as many ideas as possible

INSTRUCTION

Generate as many additional ideas as

possible

RELATIVE LOCATION OF “MOST CREATIVE”

CONCEPT

Subset (Method)

Participants (% male)

Most Creative Concept (Least)

M (BS)

M (DH)

I (BS) 21 (38.1%) -0.76 (0.05) 4.19 2.76

II (BS) 54 (70.4%) -0.30 (-0.27) 4.91 3.10

III (DH) 50 (60.0%) 0.37 (-0.32) 3.72 2.68

IV (DH) 31 (80.6%) 0.77 (-0.31) 4.55 3.06

TOTAL156 (65.4%)

0.06 (-0.25) 4.36 2.91

FOUR CASES

FOUR CASES

EXAMPLE CASE: BROOKE (I)

A section of the roof of the car can be brought down so it is in the back seat or the floor when the seats are down. The bikes can be attached to the roof on clamps that are located on the roof already. Once attached, controls lift the roof back into place, with the bikes already

secured.

MOST CREATIVE LEAST CREATIVE

EXAMPLE CASE: LINDA (IV)

MOST CREATIVE LEAST CREATIVE

The bike is fastened to a rack that is just above ground level (attached with locks like any

normal bike). The ground-level rack collapses to a rack sticking

off the back of the car, and then the rack collapses in so

the bike is above the car.

CREATIVITY “MISRULES”

Creative Concepts Must Never Have Been Thought Of Before

Creative Concepts Must Be As Little Like Shipping Products as

Possible.

Creative Concepts Are Generally Impractical

Creative Concepts Must Be Completely Creative

DESIGN HEURISTICS TO COMBAT MISRULES

Creative Concepts Can Be Based

on Existing Ideas

Creative Concepts Can Improve

on Shipping Products

Creative Concepts Can Be Practical

Ordinary Concepts Can Have Creative Components

THANK YOU

This research is funded by the National Science Foundation, Division of

Undergraduate Education, Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science,

Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (TUES Type II) Grants # 1323251 and

#1322552.

COLINGRAY.ME

DESIGNHEURISTICS.-COM