Innovation in Playground Design

I recently came across an article in TIME about designing better playgrounds.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2007398,00.html

David Rockwell designed playground equipment that consists of large foam blocks. Children can use them to build whatever they can imagine. In the article, children build cars, forts, etc.

We've been talking about how children's behavior contrasts with adults when it comes to imagination and design. Children have a lot of toys that encourage abstract representations, like Legos, dolls, blocks, and so forth. We wonder what happens between childhood and adulthood -- where does the creativity go? Children seem much less likely to fixate on the function of objects (seen in the real world, but also in research by German & Defeyter, 2000). Does fixation arise from additional knowledge, as suggested by the functional fixedness literature? Or is it the interaction with culture, expectations, etc.? Can innovation interventions help prevent fixation in design? We hope to find out through our research.

Off to a great start!

Our research is to a great start. The preliminary results were published at the annual ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) Conference this summer and the paper was awarded the best paper award.

Here’s the citation and abstract for it:

Genco, N. Holtta-Otto, K. and C.C. Seepersad, 2010, “An Experimental Investigation of the Innovation Capabilities of Engineering Students,” ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Louisville, KY.

One of the greatest challenges facing engineering education is the need to educate engineers who can innovate successfully. With increasing calls for enhancing the level of innovation in the national economy, the role of innovation in engineering education is often underemphasized and poorly understood. In this experimental study, we compare the results of concept generation exercises completed by freshman- and senior-level mechanical engineering students. Students were asked to use a modified 6-3-5/C-sketch method to generate concepts for a next-generation alarm clock. Senior-level students were divided into control and subject groups who implemented the standard 6-3-5/C-sketch method and a version of the method enhanced for creativity, respectively. Resulting concepts were analyzed using metrics for novelty, fixation, and quality. The results indicated that the freshman students produced more novel concepts and were less fixated on the sample clocks shown in the experiment. Both freshman and senior groups produced concepts with similar (high) levels of quality and feasibility. The results support the troubling conclusion that freshman engineering students are more innovative than seniors. This conclusion highlights the need for increased emphasis on innovation and creativity in the engineering curriculum.

research goals

The main objective of this research is to understand the cognitive processes underlying creativity in order to change the teaching methods to improve the students learning of creative design. 

 

Professors Katja Hölttä-Otto (Mechanical Engineering), Trina Kershaw (Psychology), and Yoon Soo Lee (Design) are working collaboratively to study how creativity is taught and learned to our undergraduate students at UMD. The project will investigate what cognitive processes are involved in learning of creativity and transferring of that knowledge into practice in both design and engineering students. In particular, limitation and restrictions resulting from past semantic knowledge as well as attitudes and assessment of creative work will be studied as it relates to creativity of a design outcome. 

 

In general, as student progress through the curriculum, they acquire specialized skills. While the acquisition of skill within the engineering domain, for example, will make students develop better designs, it may also cut down on their creativity in these designs. (Guilford 1967; Ericsson, 1998; Weisberg, 2006, Yang 2008). However, there is also evidence, that an experienced designer, or problem solver, can also bring flexibility to the individual’s creative process thus resulting in more creative work (Bilali et al. 2008; Ball 1997, Ericsson 1999). 

 

Based upon our previous work on comparing skilled upper-level engineering students to presumably less skilled freshman engineering students, we noticed the upper level students show difficulty in developing creative output. Twelve senior-level and 12 freshman-level students were asked to use a modified 6-3-5/C-sketch method (Otto & Wood 2001) to generate concepts for a next-generation alarm clock.  Resulting concepts were analyzed with metrics for novelty and quality (Shah 2003).  The novelty metric measured the variety and uniqueness embedded in the set of concepts.  Quality measured the feasibility level of the concepts.  Metric scores were analyzed with one-way ANOVA.  Results indicate that the freshman student produced significantly more novel concepts when compared to either the senior students (P value 0.001,α=0.05). The results were cross-checked with quality, to investigate whether novelty was achieved at the expense of technical feasibility.  The results indicated that the senior control group produced concepts that were significantly more feasible than the freshmen’s concepts (P value 0.040). However, it is noteworthy that the mean quality score for the freshman concepts was still 9.2 on a scale of 0-10, where 10 is the most feasible.  

 

We hypothesize, based on our experience, that similar results are true for also other than engineering students. In order to understand why the senior level students seem to produce less creative work and how to change teaching to accommodate that, we propose in this project to tackle the following research questions:  

 

1. What are the cognitive processes involved in learning engineering design? 

2. Which ones of the processes are involved in creative problem solving and design? 

3. How can those processes be used, or the knowledge of those processes to help students learn and use creativity better? 

4. Do the students’ attitudes and perceptions about creativity in different class types and at 

different levels of study effect the creative output of the students?