•  
• EDN Europe MAGAZINE
•  
• Free SUBSCRIPTION
• Subscription Renewal
• View Media Kit

• EDN
• EDN Australia
• EDN Asia
• EDN China
• EDN Japan

EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Guest Blog; is your creativity at risk?

| Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |

| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

In this guest column, Altium's Rob Evans asks the question, Have designers lost the ability to be creative?

Life is full of unassailable assumed truths and it’s an often disturbing, but always constructive exercise to challenge them.
Let’s start by questioning an easy one from everyday life: are you a good driver? Your instinctive answer is undoubtedly yes, and you would receive the same answer from anyone else you ask. But there are obviously loads of hopeless drivers on the roads. It just so happens that you, or anyone that’s asked, isn’t one of them – supposedly. It’s a self-reassuring assumed truth.
There are lots of assumed truths you can challenge yourself with. Do I treat people fairly? Am I broad minded? Does the west dominate innovation? The instinctive answer to them all is of course, yes, but your lack of an objective view should create doubt. The last one is thrown in there as a trap, but you get the idea.
Here’s another: are you a creative person? Most of us have sufficient self belief to say yes, but if you’re an electronics design engineer, it’s unquestionably true, because design is a creative process by definition. The real and challenging question is, do you apply that creativity to the benefit of the final product being developed?
Watch out for the instinctive ‘yes’ answer here, because that assumed truth needs scrutiny.
Creative engineering that adds value to a product is not the beautiful sweep of a cluster of bus tracks on a PCB. Nor is it a succinct chunk of code that’s stunning in its simplistic elegance. This type of design panache might make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but it’s only creative from the focused world of the individual design domains and frankly, it does not influence the success of the final product.
Creativity in engineering has profound and tangible value when it makes a product unique amongst its competitors. It might manifest itself as a total new genre of product or a groundbreaking new experience for the end user. But either way, it’s when innovation through creativity has delivered a sustainable market advantage to a product as a whole.
With this higher-level, real world definition of engineering creativity that counts, consider again if you deliver that benefit to the final product. Chances are you don’t, and chances are you can’t because of the restrictions imposed by the electronics design environment and methodology you use.
Now we get down to direct questions that are not clouded by assumed truths. Do you have the opportunity to explore new ideas, experiment with new technology and pursue “what if” questions as part of the design process? Innovation is the processes of harnessing and applying creativity, but the right design systems and approach need to be in place to allow it to happen. If this is not the case then your creative potential is being squandered.
It’s not only the benefits design creativity brings to a product that’s lost. It’s also the very factor that makes you as a design engineer unique and valuable. In an increasingly globalized electronics industry where design knowledge has become a commodity, there are now millions of engineers around the globe that can do your job. Perhaps there is another dubious assumed truth here" "of course my designs are special and unique”.
Acquiring and building engineering knowledge is only a temporary advantage – others will quickly learn – but your creative ability is what can set you apart from the rest. But only if you apply it. And it appears, today, most engineers can’t.
A large part of the blame for this lies squarely at the feet of the very electronics technology we employ in designs. The rapid evolution of device technologies mean that where we once developed designs based exclusively on physical hardware, a product design now involves a complex mix of hardware, software, programmable hardware and mechanical design. The result is an explosion in the complexity of the design process, and matching increase in the segmentation and constraints applied to manage that complexity.
From an engineer’s perspective, this course of isolating and bolting down of the design processes has destroyed the opportunities for creativity, and therefore the path to true innovation in product design. And to make matters worse, it also removes the ability to distinguish your unique value as an electronics engineer.
Other factors are also at play. The increasing competition imposed by a global electronics design industry has ramped up the pressure to get products to market quickly. Although time to market is only a temporary advantage, it nonetheless squeezes the engineering schedules to a point where exploring new concepts and accepting their associated risk is untenable.
Design engineers need the opportunity to experiment, explore and even productively fail. This is the font of design creativity and the innovative products it can deliver. To reach this point we need to change our approach to electronics design and the systems we use to apply that methodology.
This means standing back and taking a high-level, holistic view of the design process. It’s a view that considers the product development in its entirety, and focuses on the end user’s sustained experience with that product and the company itself.
Such an approach pulls back the view of design from a blinkered, domain-specific tactic to one that fosters collaborative product design as one task and one process. Creativity can leapfrog an insular perspective and be redirected at the product experience itself and how it hooks into broader ecosystems.
With the current segmented and constrained design systems (the conventional divide and conquer methodology) this new open approach to product design is not possible. It requires many of the existing boundaries within electronics design be broken down, and new flexible ways to design are reintroduced.
Engineering project teams are ultimately designing one product and should use a single design environment that encompasses the entire design process. Product design can then be tackled with high-level processes as a single focused task, starting with the concepts and functionality that are defined in the soft domain, while hardware is ‘plugged in’ to suit when needed.
By effectively ‘disconnecting’ the functional intelligence of a design (defined by its soft elements) from the hardware it resides on, creative innovation is no longer limited by predefined hardware constraints. The single design environment allows creative ideas to permeate through all domains without risk, freeing all engineers to explore their ideas and visions with a clear view to the final product.
When such a system is in place, applying this high level approach to electronics design will free your engineering creativity to develop the next generation of connected electronic products. True innovation in electronics design comes from engineering creativity and the opportunity to explore ideas. And we’re all familiar with it, because it’s built-in. It’s the unique “aha!” moment, the moment when the right combination of synapses fire in your frontal lobe, and in practice, when you have pursued the right “what if” questions.
It’s also critical to a product’s ability to compete in the market, and to your survival as an engineer in an increasingly globalized electronics design industry and a troubled economy. Here’s one last assumed truth to consider: "everything will really be OK in the end, I just need to ride it out.” It won’t, you know. Now is the time to act.
Contact Rob through www.altium.com

Editor addendum;
Do you agree with Rob? Is he arguing perhaps a little too much from the perspective of a vendor of the kind of design environment he espouses here? Post your comments....

Post a comment

* Display Name
* Comments
* Anti Spam security code	To pervent spamming, please enter the anti-spam code as shown above to proceed with the submission