Using Visual Displays to Stimulate Creativity: Implications for Engineering Design

Creativity is a primary and essential part of the engineering design process. So, multiple support tools are developed to aid engineers and designers in the creative design process. The use of visual displays is seen as a helpful and encouraging tool in design problem solving. The paper concludes a brief literature on the engineering design process, activities performed during its stages and various methods that can stimulate creativity in different steps of this process. This study describes analogy as a supportive and powerful tool mentioned in the literature for creative design. It helps to explain new problems in terms of familiar ones and involves the transfer of relational information between two situations. So, analogy can help designers to use visual displays in a new and creative way. The study presents the process of using visual displays in design and the results suggest that practicing with a large and diverse number of visual displays can help engineering designers in general, to spontaneously retrieve significant information, and to enhance their design abilities. It’s especially crucial in generating creative ideas and therefore creative products.