Creative experience in engineering design: the island exercise

Abstract

This work addresses the challenge of stimulating creative thought in higher education. With this aim in mind, the article describes the development of a collaborative creativity exercise designed to improve students' creative skills through self-perception of their strong and weak points. In this work the exercise is set out as a five-step methodology, which includes the determination of personality profiles using the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument and the design of an island, to be carried out by groups of students in the classroom. In this study, the exercise, which has been applied to first-year Technical Engineering in Industrial Design students for the last five years, is undertaken by different groups of students in five different sessions. Observations performed in the classroom and the results of the exercises, that is, both the islands that were designed and the choices made by the students, are used to draw the conclusions about the validity of the study. Moreover, the paper also compares the perceptions of the students who took part in the experiment this year and those who had done the exercise in previous years. The conclusions concern the style of working of each group of dominances, and highlight the effectiveness of the tool for enhancing students' creativity through self-reflection. The students' positive perceptions, even several years after doing the exercise, are good proof of this