Invention engineering – a novel approach to support creativity in engineering, practice and research

Abstract

In engineering education, practice and research, a central issue is how traditional thought patterns can be broken up by creative tools and impulses. This paper presents the outline for a method that supports the discovery of new sources of inspiration in search fields such as literature, film, fine art or music, and enables engineers to generate design alternatives in high speed and quantity. For this end, techniques from the design sciences, creativity and innovation research as well as digital information and knowledge technologies are reviewed and integrated into the conceptual approach of Invention Engineering. The aim is to develop and validate a process which provides artistic inspirations to engineers and is supported by algorithmic creativity and association tools. Thus four separate research challenges need to be addressed: a) Analysis of creative processes in engineering disciplines (inspiration, association, ideation, innovation) and their comparison to “Creative Patterns” of other domains; In addition, visions of the past and the socio-technical framework conditions of their implementation need to be explored in order to establish a model for the validation of the overall Invention Engineering method; b) Development of an “Inspiration Mining” method for obtaining creative impulses from non-engineering areas (e.g. literature, music, visual arts, film et al.); Respective search results need to be referenced with a semantic model and processed in a knowledge system (Idea Bank), which – as a kind of associative search engine – provides input for idea generation; c)Translation of established creativity and innovation research into an “Idea Engine” for generation of a large number of productive ideas; This can be done through combinatorial algorithms and methods of remote association, textual and visual-spatial idea matrices, that provide a fertile basis for radically new design and engineering ideas; d) Integration of the separate methods into a coherent process and validation of the creative support effect of the generated innovations by means of engineering psychology. This can be done on the basis of selected visionary ideas from the past (e.g. science fiction) that can be simulated on the basis of their associative foundations and implementation probabilities.