The Cognition of Engineering Design - An Opportunity of Impact

In May, 2006, the National Science Foundation hosted a workshop entitled “The Scientific Basis of Individual and Team Innovation and Discovery” (Schunn, Paulus, Cagan, & Wood, 2006). An important outcome of the workshop was a focus on the emerging research opportunity of the cognition of engineering innovation. To advance industry’s ability to be innovative, a fundamental understanding of how individuals and teams are innovative must emerge. Such an understanding would enable more effective tools and methods to assist the innovation process, to make it more efficient and productive. Cognitive science offers the possibility of not only acknowledging that creative breakthroughs happen, but how they happen, when they happen, and, from that, how to help them happen. Such understanding will provide the basis for a science of innovation, and that scientific basis will provide the means to improve design innovation outcome. A rich direction of research is needed. Design is a complex human phenomenon, so research must couple basic theoretical and experimental findings with their application to more realistic design settings, short time frames with longer time frames, and individual mechanisms with group mechanisms. Cognitive science must contribute to the core mechanisms that contribute to these situations. I believe that to be most impactful, collaborative interdisciplinary partnerships should be pursued. Although cognitive psychologists are in a position to explore the mechanisms of creativity independently, innovation requires the pragmatics of application, of how engineers solve problems and what is important to the engineers in solving those problems; engineers are also driven to place the research in the context of application. I have benefited from a collaborative research approach to understanding the cognition of innovation for more than a dozen years with Kenneth Kotovsky, a cognitive psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon. We have co-advised psychology students and engineering students, working to make inroads in understanding this complex human endeavor. There are a few key areas that I feel are critical to explore: understanding fixation—what causes it and how to overcome it; understanding representation—how it aids in problem solving and how it changes to improve outcome or overcome fixation; group cognition—how