Thinking Styles in Creative Engineering Design

Design plays an increasingly important role in engineering, and Creativity is crucial for designing products and enabling innovation. Engineers and product designers are now expected to be highly creative, productive idea generators in addition to being analytically experienced. This paper will focus on the importance of divergent thinking in the creative design process. Divergent thinking is associated with creativity that multiple unique solutions are generated for a single problem. In contrast, convergent thinking is a process that identifies a single “correct” answer.
Design process and creativity will be discussed in this study. Next divergent and convergent thinking will be defined and the importance of divergent thinking creativity will be investigated. There are various methods that encourage creative actions and divergent thinking, whether in the arts or sciences. Brain Storming, Mind Mapping, TRIZ and Analogical Thinking are popular and useful methods which are mentioned in creativity studies. So they can be used in engineering design process to encourage divergent thinking. As a final point, the mentioned methods are introduced and explained.