How to have ideas

Description

The ability to have good ideas is at the core of the engineer’s craft. In any engineering project there comes a time when, a need having been identified, and technical skills having been mastered, the engineer needs to have an idea about how to apply her or his technical skills to serve that need. The trouble is that idea generation is rarely taught in undergraduate engineering teaching, which is why we have created this course.

Nobody knows exactly what happens in the brain at the moment an idea occurs. But there is lots that that we do to create the optimal conditions for improving the way we have ideas.

We have created this workshop to help engineers create the conditions and to adopt strategies that will increase the likelihood of them having good ideas. The content is drawn from over fifteen years of design teaching for engineers at universities and in business. Our approach at Think Up is always to provide practical guidance so that participants can go away and apply the techniques immediately and feel the benefits.

Aimed At

Undergraduate engineers from all engineering disciplines

Learning Outcomes

Participants will:

• Be able to describe why idea generation is a universal, everyday, human skill, not just for ‘creatives’
• Be able to describe a simple model for where ideas come from
• Explain how this model applies to their urrent work and in other situations
• Explain how to carry-out effective research to support idea generation
• List ‘active attention’ techniques to stimulate idea generation
• Describe how to harness intrinsic motivation for ideas generation
• Describe the importance of state of mind on idea generation and be able to use different techniques to alter state of mind
• Learn how to be a good audience for ideas

Further Information

The course is suitable for up to 100 students, workring in groups of 4 to 5. The activites are a mixture of group work, facilitator-led group discussions and self-led reflection.

The course is designed to last three to four hours, depending on availability.

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Event Date

27 Jan 2017

Host Organisation

Think Up

Location

This course can be delivered at any university in the EU.

Cost

Confirmed on enquiry