Harnessing Creativity for Design: Tests in an Introduction to Engineering Class

Exercises targeted at each of the creativity categories were implemented in an engineering seminar for freshmen at MIT's D-Lab. Students built a prototype of a manual tilling tool and were tasked to ideate improvements. They then completed the targeted exercises and immediately transitioned back to ideation of design improvements. Two of the three teams demonstrated originality in response - generating ideas for new features, as opposed to simply changing dimensions of existing features. Greater fluency and elaboration of ideas may have emerged given more time to complete the task. The results suggest that some level of creative capacity was built, and future work is planned to elicit details on these dynamics.