The Relevance of Creativity for Civil Engineering - The Main Article

 

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According to Aparicio and Ruiz-Teran (2007), “many recent graduates are incapable of formulating creative solutions to problems they have never seen before; therefore, they do not have the ability to solve ‘real world messy problems’ and open-ended problems” (p. 3). Being creative is not creating a new tool or process. It is invention. Despite this “creative” is an adjective given to solutions that give a new viewpoint, and very adequate for a specific case. Being able to formulate creative solutions to brand new problems, whether a thought or idea, an object, a product or a process, a work of art or performance; is an ability called creativity (Bradan, 2007). For Civil Engineers it is not different, they are required to be creative all the time. Consequently, it is so important to have professionals skilled with creative abilities to the professional market. Regarding the facts that creativity is so important, and can it make the professionals be innovative, and entrepreneurial. In addition, creativity can be taught at Civil Engineering Schools in order to improve student’s creative potential.

Walkway Bridge.
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There are many examples of creativity in Civil Engineering. The first bridges, or walkway bridges, were invented more than 4,500 years ago in Europe. The ancient bridges, as today, allowed animals, vehicles, and people to come and go easily and safely cross rivers and marshes.

Boat Bridge.
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When Xerxes, the King of Persia, wanted to invade Greece in 484 B.C., he first needed to overcome the Hellespont Strait between Asia and Europe, one distance more than 1 mile (1.6 kilometers). His solution for this issue was basically gather hundred of boats to support the beams of the bridge instead using piers. Many years after, in A.D. 40, the Roman Emperor Caligula used boats again to to make a bridge to across the Bay of Naples in Italy. Shifting to the present, many bridges were made in whole world. Each one is very different from an other one even if two bridges seem to be the same or twin. Over this timeline about bridges, creativity, innovation, and invention can be identified without difficulties. A invention happened when the first bridge was created. Before the first bridges were created, people crossed rivers and marshes swimming or walking through the water. It means that the people had to walk many miles to find a place along the river that crossing the river was possible. The Roman Emperor Caligula trying to cross the Bay of Naples used a similar solution that Xerxes used to cross the Hellespont Strait between Asia and Europe. What the Roman Emperor used his creativity to make the same solution used years before in a different place work to solve his problem. Of course, he changed many aspects to make the same macro idea, a bridge with boats, works. Through the years, the human beings stopped using boat bridges and adopted many different models of bridges using many different materials, such as masonry, and wheel, and very different project designs. These changes in how to build bridges can be identified as innovations (Briscoe, 2005).

Creativity is important for Civil Engineers because it makes possible to the professionals develop solutions that attend what their client need, solutions with low costs, and great durability, what can be called effective solutions.

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As Badran (2007) says, “creativity, from an engineering perspective, requires knowledge of the technology, and an understanding of the human condition, both locally and around the world” (p. 3). With the complexity of the necessities that modern society demands nowadays, Civil Engineers, are not different from the other professionals, and they should be capable of delivering creative technical solutions. As supported by Michael (2004), “It is accepted here that creativity is a quintessential attribute of human beings” (p. 1). As an example, Zheng, Shih, Lozano and Mo (2011), show in their research the importance of the creativity on Civil Engineering to foster nanotechnology solutions applied to Civil Engineering necessities. As the results of their research show, improvements in the use of nanotechnology helps to develop materials and designs that will provide materials with high durability, which is very essential because high durability delivers a low necessity of maintenance and risk that small issues cause big issues, and monitoring systems, which make possible to the professionals evaluate the “health” of the building, and do interventions if necessary (Zheng, Shih, Lozano and Mo, 2011).

Creativity plays an important role in making the innovation process possible because innovation occurs with the practice of creativity, so working creatively makes the professional be innovative easily. The Oxford Student’s Dictionary (2007) summarizes this idea by defining innovation as “to create new things, ideas or ways of doing something”. Even though people might think that creative and innovation are exactly the same thing, each concept is very different. Creativity is connecting the dots. With creative thinking problems are solved or creating a new concept. For example, the invention of the radio. Innovation is improve what has been done: listen to music. The way how people listen to music by their own has been suffering many innovations lately. For example, after the radio portable devices were invented, such as the Walkman, a portable cassette player, Discman, a portable CD player, MP3 Player, a portable digital format music player. These are ordinary examples. For Civil Engineering, being creative means, for example, building the house walls with masonry materials instead the traditional wood. Further, innovation means use different kinds of masonry materials by the time better ones are discovered, such as, cement brick instead mud brick. Civil Engineers can be innovative with new process, method, and business, for example.

Entrepreneurship is important for Civil Engineers because make these professionals think “how much money this ‘creative solution’ can make?” (Silva, Henriques & Carvalho, 2009). Entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity are highly associated (Badran, 2007). Bradan (2007) affirms “An innovator is not simply a dreamer, but a person who sees the potential of an idea, promotes it and has profit in mind. Engineering wise, an innovator is almost a technopreneur in the making” (p. 3).

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An entrepreneur will look wider than any other because his products consist in more than solutions for a perfect world (where anyone can afford with it), but to how make the product cheaper or make the product fit to the consumer’s wallet. Today, many people can develop a creative solution, but another characteristic is required to creative people: being an entrepreneur.

Many professionals cannot achieve their full potential just because they have habits that suppress their inherent creativity. In order to release this potential, Civil Engineering Schools have an important role teaching students to be creative professionals. Through research, scientists have found that the creative performance of the students was improved by teaching creativity with complex problems that can have many different possible solutions. (Mahboub, Portillo, Yinhui, & Chadranratna, 2004; Michael 2004). According to Michael (2004),  at Civil Engineering Schools “students are encouraged to design robots to accomplish specific tasks using a restricted set of materials; or to use some unlikely material like ice-cream sticks or spaghetti to construct a bridge (e.g. The West Point Bridge Design Contest (ASCE 2003)), or concrete to construct a boat (Johnson 1999). These competitions do help students to show their creativity in designing ‘useful’ artifacts under special sets of constraints” (p. 3). Looking for the positive effects of teaching creativity, schools of civil engineering should include in their teaching agenda topics to enhance creativity.

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Creativity is essential nowadays for all the professions. Civil Engineers every day have to deal with many problems that require from them creative solutions. Since new materials that are options to be used in building through needs that come from consumers, there are many ways to show creativity. On one hand, students struggle with creativity; on the other hand, they have many ways to improve their creativity to they be effective professionals dealing with creative solutions. When teachers give the right value to creativity during the academy, the students become professionals that creativity makes sense and not is a threat on professional life. If students and teachers take creative thinking as way of Civil Engineering work, there is no doubts that the solutions offered by these professionals will not only more adequate to the consumers need, but more affordable using their entrepreneurial abilities.