Creativity training has been widely integrated into engineering education as a means to prepare students to be an innovative force in design industry. However, much of this research has focused on training students to be creative idea generators, with limited attention to what happens after this generation. Thus, the current study was developed to understand how creative ideas are promoted or filtered throughout the design process in order to focus our educational efforts. In order to accomplish this, an 8-week study with 130 engineering students was conducted. Our results point to the reduction in creativity throughout the design process and student abandonment of novel concepts. We also expose the influence of the design task on student creativity.

Building prototypes is an important part of the concept selection phase of the design process, where fuzzy ideas get represented to support communication and decision making. However, the previous studies have shown that prototypes generate different levels of user feedback based on their fidelity and esthetics. Furthermore, prior research on concept selection has shown that individual risk attitude effects how individuals select ideas, as creative ideas are perceived to be riskier in comparison to less creative ideas. While the role of risk has been investigated in concept selection, there is lack of research on how risk is related to the selection of prototypes at various levels of fidelity. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of prototype fidelity, concept creativity, and risk aversion on perceived riskiness and concept selection through a between-subjects study with 72 engineering students. The results revealed that there was a “goldilocks” effect in which students choose concepts with “just the right amount” of novelty, not too much and not too little, as long as quality was adequate. In addition, the prototype fidelity of a concept had an interaction with uniqueness, indicating that unique concepts are more likely to be perceived as less risky if presented at higher levels of fidelity.

The purpose of product dissection is to teach students how a product works and provide them with inspiration for new ideas. However, little is known about how variations in dissection activities impact creative outcomes or engineering self-efficacy (ESE) and creative self-efficacies (CSE). This is important since the goal of engineering education is to produce capable and creative engineers. The current study was, thus, developed to address this research gap through a factorial experiment. The results showed that idea development was not impacted by dissection conditions but that ESE and CSE were increased through these activities. The results also showed that higher levels of CSE and ESE had alternate effects on novel idea development indicating they are at odds in engineering education.

Design researchers have long sought to understand the mechanisms that support creative idea development. However, one of the key challenges faced by the design community is how to effectively measure the nebulous construct of creativity. The social science and engineering communities have adopted two vastly different approaches to solving this problem, both of which have been deployed throughout engineering design research. The goal of this paper was to compare and contrast these two approaches using design ratings of nearly 1000 engineering design ideas. The results of this study identify that while these two methods provide similar ratings of idea quality, there was a statistically significant negative relationship between these methods for ratings of idea novelty. In addition, the results show discrepancies in the reliability and consistency of global ratings of creativity. The results of this study provide guidance for the deployment of idea ratings in engineering design research and evidence.

Product dissection is a problem-based learning activity that is often integrated into engineering courses in order to help students learn to systematically disassemble and analyze a product and all of its parts. Product dissection was first introduced into engineering education in the early 1990's and has since been a staple in introductory courses. Although many studies have been conducted in relation to product dissection, research has not been systematic, leaving us to question how variations in product dissection impact learning, creativity, or both for students when used in the classroom. To fill this gap, our research group has conducted numerous studies over the last four years in order to systematically investigate variations in deployment of product dissection in an engineering classroom. Using the findings from these studies, we have developed a virtual product dissection module and deployed it in an introductory engineering course. We provide recommendations for the use of product dissection in the classroom and provide insights into the deployment of this module. The results from the case study that follows indicate that students found the dissection modules helped them understand how the products worked and that it could be used to inspire creative ideas during idea generation. Although the students found the dissection useful, some of them struggled to see how their dissected product related to the design task they were completing. These results are used for continued development of the product dissection classroom lesson modules.