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Creativity is often equated with self-expression, and notionally associated with the arts. But creativity is about coming up with new ideas, exploring novel options, devising new ways to solve problems. Creativity is an important life skill, not least in engineering practice.
Is engineering perceived as a creative profession? Probably not. The UK has a flourishing ‘creative industries’ sector, but few, if any, conventional engineering companies would be considered part of it.
Yet there are countless ‘creatives’ – designers and their ilk – in the engineering workplace, and creativity is at the heart of what many companies do. Engineering is seen as ordered, process-oriented and systematic – which it is, but order provides a context or framework in which creative thinking can flourish and be applied to solve practical problems.
Importantly, creativity can connect engineering to people. Too often, engineering has developed functional solutions that have solved technical problems but have ultimately failed because they were never embraced by users.
Creativity can add an emotional dimension to problem-solving, ensuring that user perspectives are integral to both the conceptualisation of a problem and the development of solutions. Design processes create the interface between user and product, hugely influencing user perceptions.
So should we expect engineers to specialise in creativity? Engineers need much knowledge and many skills, and the ability to think creatively is certainly one of them. But it is implausible to imagine that we can develop a workforce of ‘Renaissance engineers’ who are also specialists in design. The modern world is simply too complicated.
But we can boost the ‘creativity quotient’ in engineering in other ways. We can create more opportunities for those with creative tendencies to channel their interests and expertise in engineering.
The world is awash with designers. They come in many flavours – graphic designers, product designers and so on – but their underlying skill sets are often very similar. Many more could find a natural home working alongside engineers, with engineering providing an outlet for their creativity, helping to solve practical problems.
Will they have the background knowledge and skills to be able to do this? Some may have a reasonable level of mathematical ability – surely enough to be able to make important contributions.
Others may not, but could nevertheless bring valuable alternative skills to a multidisciplinary team. Web designers don’t necessarily need to know how to code proficiently in order to produce successful, user-oriented designs – they simply need to understand the process by which a website is built.
What about budding engineers? Most importantly, we need them to recognise the value of creative thinking and the benefits it can bring to their work. Engineering may promote a mindset that there is one perfect solution to a problem. There rarely is – particularly if the engineering product is to be used by people.
There is more likely to be an array of possible solutions each meeting slightly different success criteria in different ways – there is no perfect design for, say, an alarm clock. So collaboration and team-working, recognising the fundamental importance of creative and design input, should be crucial to the work of engineers. We also need a generation of leaders prepared to give design the status it deserves.
Encouraging creative thinking is something we could usefully do in all subjects, including the physical sciences and maths.
Unfortunately, we have created an education system that channels young people down divergent arts and science routes, with creativity largely associated with the former. Inevitably, we create narrowly educated communities with a poor appreciation of other domains of knowledge and a culture of mutual misunderstanding.
Exposure of the scientifically minded to arts and humanities subjects can open minds to the potential power of creativity and the importance of the human experience. Conversely, a realisation that creativity can be applied in the realm of technology and engineering would surely broaden the horizons of the artistically inclined. Yet our education system drives a wedge between the two from an absurdly early age.
Engineering needs to take a hard look at itself, and think about whether the image it projects is likely to attract the creatively minded who may not have a natural empathy for science and technology but could have much to offer.
It needs to consider whether its vision of the future of engineering truly has people at its heart. By bringing more creative individuals into the fold, it can enhance emotional input into problem-solving – and make engineering more successful.
Clive Grinyer is currently Customer Experience Director at Barclays. He founded the design company Tangerine with, among others, Jonathan Ive, now head of design and user interface at Apple, and has held multiple senior positions in product design and design of digital services.