Creativity – current work

A website base for documenting and representing my current work in creativity studies.

Courses I teach

Course Description Most recent
Problem Solving with TRIZ Course information, including syllabus, is available here.

Course for practicing engineers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates, systematically introducing TRIZ concepts so they may be immediately applied. Topics include psychological challenges to problem solving, functional modeling, cause effect chains, engineering contradictions, physical contradictions, ideality, substance field modeling, and trends of technological evolution.

This course was developed under a grant from the Institute for Advanced Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratories (IAS).		 2008
Creativity and Innovation and Interdisciplinary Problem Solving Course for chemical engineering undergraduate students, integrating "soft skills" in effective communication and teamwork with critical thinking, problem-solving, and design. 2007
Junior Design Laboratory Course for chemical engineering undergraduate students, integrating "soft skills" in effective communication and teamwork with critical thinking, problem-solving, and design. 2004
Creativity and Innovation in Engineering Design Course for science and engineering undergraduate students, covering elementary TRIZ (Russian-developed theory of inventive problem solving) and a model of practical creativity 2002
Critical Approaches to Engineering Practice Course for engineering undergraduate students, introducing negotiation, leadership, and business principles and applying them to an examination of engineering culture 2001

Workshops and presentations

Title Description Most recent
Problem Solving with TRIZ A presentation for engineers, introducing the TRIZ methodology: when creativity is warranted and when not, how to outperform brainstorming, moving past psychological limitations of individual and team-based problem solving. 2007
Answer-resistant Problems and a Model of Practical Creativity Lecture-presentation illustrating a common structure of problems in the disciplines of negotiation, leadership, and design and deriving a model of practical creativity 2005
Practical Leadership For faculty and graduate students, designed to help participants 1) recognize work avoidance in groups, and 2) mobilize people to address problems 2003
Practical Leadership; Practical Creativity Half-day workshop covering "Practical Leadership" materials and incorporating segments on problem-solving (informed by TRIZ methods) and giving feedback effectively 2003

Sources

Field or Discipline Relevant aspects, influences
Complexity theory Creativity and effective reasoning do not find a foothold when ideas and models are too stable or, on the other hand, chaotic. The boundary region between near-equilibrium systems and chaotic behavior is particularly fruitful, however. This region is the focus of complexity theory. See: Taylor's The Moment of Complexity.
Negotiation Avoidance of one-dimensional, 'compromise' solutions. Interests as a class comprising multiple, possible positions. See: Fisher and Ury's Getting to Yes.
Leadership Distinction between technical problems (exercises) and adaptive problems (problems). Error of applying expertise in situations where innovation or adaptation is required. Characteristics of work avoidance. See: Heifetz' Leadership Without Easy Answers.
Design TRIZ methodology, generating breakthrough solutions (both/and) instead of tradeoffs (either/or). See: Savransky's Engineering of Creativity. Rapid prototyping or "rapid failure". See: Peters' Circle of Innovation.
Facilitation Process expertise instead of, or in addition to, content expertise. Essential listening skills. Avoiding false consensus.
Conducting Distinction between imposing direction and facilitating. Negative effects of ego and insecurity. Need for both technique and aesthetics.
Feminism Inclusive nature of solutions. Challenge of transforming traditions, instead of merely extending them. Rejection of positivism for constructivism.
Education Epistemological modes of college students. Motion beyond presumed expertise to an expectation that knowledge is "true" only in a context. See: Baxter-Magolda's Knowing and Reasoning in College: Gender-related Patterns in Students' Intellectual Development.
Pedagogy College students' intolerance of ambiguity. When confronted with a challenge, either 1) presuming to know exactly how to solve a problem (exercise), or 2) not having any sense of how to proceed.

This page last modified: May 15, 2008