How do engineers come up with new ideas?

Joel Chan and Christian Schunn of the University of Pittsburgh have been researching the way engineers create. They say that not enough has been done to understand the creative process. Understanding it, according to Chan and Schunn, may provide a road map for speeding up innovation.

Chan, a graduate student in psychology in Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, and his mentor Schunn, a professor of psychology as well as a senior scientist in Pitt’s Learning Research and Development Center, recently published a paper online in the journal Cognitive Science that delves into the workings of the creative engineering mind by examining the process in real life.

“Most companies make all their money on new products,” Schunn says. “They barely break even on old products. They have to innovate to be viable, and that’s a hard path to follow.”

Along with Chan, Schunn used multiple hours of transcripts of a professional engineering team’s ‘brainstorming’ sessions and broke down the conversation systematically, looking for the path by which thought A led to thought B that led to breakthrough C.

“We want to understand the nature of cognitive limitations,” Schunn says. “Why do we get stuck (on an idea), what kinds of things get us unstuck and why do they work?”

Part of their research related to how far analogies can influence creative thinking, investigating the hypothesis that far analogies lead directly to very novel concepts via large steps in conceptual spaces (jumps).

‘Far analogy’ means using an analogy from outside of the conceptual domain of the problem being solved. In the past, many great thinkers have used far analogies to make the leap necessary to find a new concept. The oldest known example¹ is that of Vitruvius, a Roman architect, who described how to best build a theatre by suggesting that voice sounds are like ocean waves:

“As in the case of the waves formed in the water, so it is in the case of the voice,” Vitruvius wrote. “The first wave, when there is no obstruction to interrupt it, does not break up the second or the following waves, but they all reach the ears of the lowest and highest spectators without an echo.”

Using the analogy of ocean waves, Vitruvius was possibly the first person to be able to visualise sound as waves, enabling him to design theatres for the best acoustic response.

In their study, Chan and Schunn perfumed an analysis of the designers’ conversations, mapping out how one thought led to the next. They found that when group members used far analogies, they were not more likely to reach new ideas than when they used other kinds of analogies or no analogy at all. However, that didn’t mean the far analogies weren’t useful - far analogies helped the designers make a series of related, incremental connections, rather than leaping over big concepts, but they are often small incremental steps they might not have otherwise taken.

“We analyzed the temporal interplay between far analogy use and creative concept generation in a professional design team’s brainstorming conversations, investigating the hypothesis that far analogies lead directly to very novel concepts via large steps in conceptual spaces (jumps)…Surprisingly, we found that concepts were more similar to their preceding concepts after far analogy use compared to baseline situations (i.e., without far analogy use). Yet far analogies increased the team's concept generation rate compared to baseline conditions. Overall, these results challenge the view that far analogies primarily lead to novel concepts via jumps in conceptual spaces and suggest alternative pathways from far analogies to novel concepts (e.g., iterative, deep exploration within a functional space).^”2

What they found in the sessions they studied is that new ideas didn’t spring fully formed after massive cognitive leaps. Creativity is a stepwise process in which idea A spurs a new but closely related thought, which prompts another incremental step, and the chain of little mental advances sometimes eventually ends with an innovative idea in a group setting.

So contrary to popular belief that new ideas often come as the result of large cognitive leaps, new ideas tend to come most commonly in incremental steps - however, far analogy does aide in this process, perhaps by introducing a new shift in thinking that allows a new incremental step that may not have been possible otherwise.

References

1. Holyoak, K. and Thagard, P. 1994, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought, Bradford Books

2. Chan, J. and Schunn, C. 2014, The Impact of Analogies on Creative Concept Generation: Lessons From an In Vivo Study in Engineering Design, Cognitive Science, doi: 10.1111/cogs.12127

3. http://www.news.pitt.edu/news/pitt-psychology-researchers-explore-how-engineers-create

4. http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/18/where-do-new-ideas-come-from