A proposal of prescriptive design process towards highly creative engineering design

Abstract

In industrialised countries, the competitiveness of the products/services of the manufacturing industries in the global market is declining due to many factors, including products commoditization and rapid technological growth in developing countries. For this reason, engineering designers in industrialised countries are required to enhance their creativity in design with redefining customer value and redesigning advanced solutions. In recent years, the design thinking, which is known as a practical method for user centered creative design, is attracting attention as a practical strategy to accelerate creative innovations in engineering design. However, the logical details in designers’ cognitive process are still not clear, which hinders the practice and dissemination of design thinking. Based on above background, this paper proposes a prescriptive cognitive process model that leads highly creative engineering design. The proposed model is constructed based on the analysis of characteristics of exist engineering design process models and findings from creative thinking processes derived in cognitive science domain. The proposed model comprises following five steps: requirement finding, design solution finding, verification, validation, and documentation. The proposed model was applied to analyse a bicycle design case retrospectively, which is a past actual example that achieved highly innovative design. As a result, the application result demonstrates that the proposed model can explain the mechanism of creative engineering design process and be expected to provide knowledge basis towards creative engineering design.