Human-Centered Engineering Design - Lesson 04 - Creativity and Lateral Thinking

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3968-6540

Document Type

Other

Publication Date

Winter 1-15-2025

Department

Thayer School of Engineering

Comments

Purpose and audience. This is the fourth lesson in a series, “Human-Centered Engineering Design.” These lessons are intended to be integrated into introductory courses on engineering design at the undergraduate level, across any engineering discipline. They are designed to function either as a sequence or as stand alone lessons to fill an existing gap in a course.

This fourth lesson, Creativity and Lateral Thinking, introduces creativity as an outcome–rather than as an intrinsic aptitude–and offers lateral thinking as a set of skills and methods for reliably generating novel ideas. The primary guidance is for students to consider separating idea generation from idea analysis and presents a little neuroscience and strategic rationale for the importance of doing so. The lesson then introduces one structured method for a team to brainstorm and prompts students to practice with a “carrying device” challenge, somewhat aligning with the topical theme of the series.

This lesson is designed to follow the previous one on Abductive Reasoning and Problem Definition, but it can be used as a stand-alone lesson as the instructor chooses. Links to our materials for this lesson can be found at this link.

This lesson series was funded by a Dartmouth Library’s Open Education Initiative grant. All materials have a Creative Commons license–they are free to use and adapt for non-commercial purposes with attribution to the authors and Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College.

Structure at a glance:

  1. Slides orienting this lesson and on Lateral Thinking - 7 minutes

  2. Improv warm-up: “Remember When…” - 3 minutes

  3. Slides introducing one Group Brainstorming method - 5 minutes

  4. Practice challenge - 20 minutes

  5. Slides on assumptions and constraints - 5 minutes

Discussion / Q&A - As time allows

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