Creating Creative Educational Opportunities among Engineering and Arts Students

This paper aims at introducing new multidisciplinary activities between students from the Engineering and Arts majors. It sheds the light on how engineering students can be prepared to become 'outside the box thinkers' by interacting and working on common projects with students from the arts and design majors. The collaborative efforts revolved around the aspects of “design thinking”, an innovative and broad project based educational model that uses a systematic approach towards problem solving. With traditional engineering education, students are accustomed to breaking down theoretical problems and solving them using standard procedures. Although such a way of teaching instils analytical and methodological thinking, but it is not enough to prepare students to be creative in solving future problems. Research shows that engineers who practice one of the visual arts develop enhanced observational capabilities, which help them to be more effective and innovative. Taking it a step further, the design thinking process has proven to be phenomenally successful in the past, in that it better prepares students to face the challenges of the industrial world, by instilling qualities such as empathy, teamwork and adaptability. By collaborating with students from artistical backgrounds, engineering students can benefit from the creative thinking of art majors. This engineering-art connection also works in the opposite direction. Art students would simultaneously gain vision on how to bring their ideas to life more realistically. Through collaboration with engineering students, they would acquire systematic thinking and planning. In addition, they would learn scientific and engineering facts about their designs that would help them grow as artists themselves. The above premises make an excellent ground to build several activities that can be used for the education and training of engineering and arts students. These activities required students to establish some shared resources beforehand which are tailored to teach other majors about their own major without diving deeper but instead focusing on creating the connections to see the overall picture. Over the course of one semester students from all majors were able to collect solid material in the form of PowerPoint presentations to share and explain to other majors. They also brainstormed different project ideas to develop constructive collaboration and synergy among themselves and produced two ideas which they executed and constructed successfully. The thought process behind the brainstorming and execution of these ideas relied heavily on the design thinking model and the stages of this model. The first project was to build a giant physical sculpture of a water bottle and a lung hanged from the top side inside the bottle. The drive behind the design relates back to the source of life, air, and human lungs, confined within a cage of plastic waste. The design gives the recycled waste a humanitarian aspect, connecting our lives to what we consume and harm the environment with. The second design is for a kinetic arts installation, and it is still a work under progress. This paper will show in detail both projects and how they helped in improving students thinking skills while employing the stages and steps set down by the general design thinking ladder/framework.