Analysis of the integration of knowledge and novelty in creative engineering design

Abstract

The general creative process is incapable of strict analysis but for engineering it is correctly identified with the design function that combines knowledge, derived from science, technology, and past experience, with the novelty of an invention or development. Engineering achievements range from projects of vast scale, such as the elements of the NASA space programme, to minute devices of great ingenuity such as human joint replacements. As Professor Jones remarked in his 1974 paper to the IMechE, ‘Koestler's book ‘The Act of Creation’ did not mention engineering and the word creativity was not in the Oxford English Dictionary of 1973!′ The nature of creative thinking is chaotic and many significant breakthroughs seem to have arisen by accident. The current paper concentrates on the early stages of the evolution of a new engineering entity and studies the blending of rigorous scientific knowledge (materials, dynamics, systems etc.) with the much more ‘fuzzy’ process of taking the first concepts through the process of preliminary design to a viable product. The work makes a contribution to engineering education.

In seeking the heart of the creative engineering process examples are examined mainly from large-scale projects, as typically found in aerospace. This experience is compared briefly with civil, mechanical, and systems engineering to seek for differences and similarities in method and, in contrast with the modern ‘enterprise function’, i.e. the process from the inventor to a new business. The last of these is of considerable economic significance today.