Creativity in the engineering design process

It is accepted that innovation is key to any company's long term success. Despite this there are few published engineering design processes with the inclusion, mention or consideration of the creative process. With a strong body of research from the social sciences based upon the different creative processes, it is argued that engineering design research should embrace these processes in order to effectively adopt the tools, methods and techniques that have been developed around them. In this paper it is argued that the design process and the creative process are not synonymous, but it instead will consider creativity as an essential element in designing [1]. Over 100 different design and creative processes have been analysed and considered in total, 42 of which have been tabulated for comparative purposes within this paper. The linear style in which the majority of the process models are presented enabled easy comparison of the terminology. By extracting the key phases from both types of process, a descriptive process model is proposed describing creative process as a cyclical subset of the engineering design process. The overall purpose of this paper is to identify where and when in the process of design does creativity occur.