Teaching Creativity in Mechanical Design

This paper describes a new method to teach creativity in mechanical design. The method is called ACRREx, which stands for Abstracting, Categorizing, Reflecting, Reformulating and Extending. By rejecting intuition-only designs and by offering more than just facilitating or stimulating idea generation, ACRREx is a systematic design method that uses categorization of knowledge to guide a designer to find “voids” in the knowledge, giving a good chance that innovative solutions can be found in those areas. ACRREx can be combined with other systematic design methods such as the Pahl & Beitz method as well as with intuitive design methods such as brainstorming and bio-inspired design. We teach ACRREx in our MSc course Bio-Inspired Design and to our graduation students. The results are fruitful and show the method’s potential for teaching creativity