2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Research has shown the need to explore creativity in the context of engineering curricula, including when solving complex design problems where there is not one correct solution. To further understand the relationship between creativity and engineering ill-structured problem solving, in this paper, semi-structured interviews were conducted, transcribed, and coded after faculty members, practitioners, and undergraduate students were asked to solve an ill-structured engineering problem. In this follow-up interview, 37 undergraduate students ranging from freshman to fifth-year senior (in addition to 19 faculty members, and 11 practitioners) in civil engineering were asked to explain the impact of creativity in the problem solving process, and also were asked to complete a creativity survey (K-DOCS). This paper discusses common themes shared among faculty, practitioners, and undergraduate engineering students, including varied creativity scores (self-rated and measured), and different opinions among participants with various levels of problem solving and engineering fieldwork experience in defining being creative (or not) in solving ill-structured engineering problems.
The collected data reflects that the three groups have a variety of definitions of being creative (or not) throughout the problem solving process. Common themes include the following: Undergraduate students focus on relating creativity to generating multiple original ideas, and generating ideas that are extravagant and/or out of the box. This is different from faculty members which consider creativity to come from accumulated background knowledge and past experiences, and engineering practitioners which more often consider the safety- and risk-related considerations when working towards developing solutions to problems. In addition, a theme discussed was that creative solutions may be considered to be not as effective and/or realistic, and may be more risky. The data and results of this project provide insights for educators in the engineering field to incorporate domain of knowledge or experience that would help to support college engineering students' engineering problem-solving, and to help students work toward solutions that are both creative and that will work.