Professional Preparation: A Course That Successfully Teaches Needed Skills Using Different Pedagogical Techniques

To bridge a gap we perceive to exist between the traditionally educated engineer, who is skilled primarily in high tech, and the broader trained engineer being called for by industry, we have developed a senior level course entitled Professional Preparation. This course is built around a group design project, but also includes exposure to a wide variety of needed skills such as problem solving, creative thinking, ethics, writing to learn, producing documentation and making oral and written reports. Student and employer reaction to the course is uniformly enthusiastic. Data collected from a survey of over 400 of our graduates shows a marked difference in their perception of the importance of and their educational preparation in specific skills with additional differences between those who took this course and those who did not.     

Understanding design: Artificial intelligence as an explanatory paradigm

A substantial part of the intellectual content of what H A Simon called the ‘sciences of the artificial’ is contained in the activity we calldesign. A central aim ofdesign theory is to construct testable, explanatory models of the design process that will serve to enhance our understanding of how artifacts are, or can be, designed. In this paper, we discuss how some of the basic concepts underlying the discipline ofartificial intelligence (ai) can serve to provide anexplanatory paradigm for understanding design. We present an AI-based model of the design process and describe some of the implications of this model for our understanding of design — including that aspect of it we call ‘invention’.     

Sketching and creative discovery

In the search for helpful computer tools for sketching in the early phases of design, the approach was taken to experimentally study sketching behaviour. In two series of experiments two mental processes revealed themselves as essential in the creative process: Restructuring and Combining. These two processes are in turn influenced by expertise in sketching and individual creativity. In this article each of the factors: Combining, Restructuring, Expertise and Creativity, will be separately highlighted with respect to their impact on sketching behavior. Finally, on the basis of these results conclusions are drawn for computerized sketching aids.     

点滴火花汇成融融之火：没有进取心就没有进步

德国真正意义上的原材料不仅是石油与矿石，还具有创造性与想象力。保证创新能力和决心是经济持续发展、人民生活富裕和安居乐业的关键。具有“企业家特征”的员工是实现该目的的前提。     

我国乳品加工技术创新体系发展方向的研究

从乳品加工产前、产中、产后三个方面，论述了我国乳品工业在技术方向应优先发展领域和发展方向。     

多媒体课件在开放实验室中的应用

介绍了制作多媒体课件的必要性，及所制作课件的特点。该课件与实验室管理系统配合起来，有利于实现实验室的全面开放。     

"Does reward increase or decrease creativity?": Correction to Eisenberger and Selbst.

Reports an error in "Does reward increase or decrease creativity" by Robert Eisenberger and Michael Selbst (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1994[Jun], Vol 66[6], 1116-1127). In the aforementioned article, Figures 1 and 2 were interchanged. The figures appear with their correct captions in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1994-40652-001.) Two studies involving 504 school children investigated why behaviorists and cognitively oriented investigators have come to opposite conclusions about reward's effects on creativity. A monetary reward for a high degree of divergent thought in 1 task (word construction) increased children's subsequent originality in a different task (picture drawing). The same reward, made contingent on a low degree of divergent thought, reduced this generalized originality. These effects were eliminated by using a large reward and were restored by keeping the large reward out of the children's sight. The results suggest that reward training increases generalized creativity when (1) a high degree of divergent thought is required and (2) the reward is presented in not too salient a fashion. The findings are consistent with a 2-factor interpretation of rewarded creativity effects that incorporates learned industriousness and selective attention. [A correction concerning this article appears in Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 1994(Jul), Vol 67(1), 125. Figures 1 and 2 were interchanged.] (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

论楼盘标志设计的创意与表现

楼盘标志是房地产视觉营销的核心要素,标志的优劣直接关系整体品牌视觉形象的水平。本文主要对楼盘标志设计的创意与表现的方法及原则进行探讨。文章首先指出深刻理解楼盘的市场营销策略是进行创意的基础,设计的目标就是把楼盘的"卖点"以极富创意的视觉表现方式呈现给目标消费者。其次提出标志创意要在共性基础上善于发现和表现个性。最后本文从造型、色彩、编排等方面对标志的视觉表现提出了一些设计原则和需注意的细节问题。     

Incorporating characteristics of human creativity into an evolutionary art algorithm

A perceived limitation of evolutionary art and design algorithms is that they rely on human intervention; the artist selects the most aesthetically pleasing variants of one generation to produce the next. This paper discusses how computer generated art and design can become more creatively human-like with respect to both process and outcome. As an example of a step in this direction, we present an algorithm that overcomes the above limitation by employing an automatic fitness function. The goal is to evolve abstract portraits of Darwin, using our 2nd generation fitness function which rewards genomes that not just produce a likeness of Darwin but exhibit certain strategies characteristic of human artists. We note that in human creativity, change is less choosing amongst randomly generated variants and more capitalizing on the associative structure of a conceptual network to hone in on a vision. We discuss how to achieve this fluidity algorithmically.

Some Empirical Criteria for Attributing Creativity to a Computer Program

Over recent decades there has been a growing interest in the question of whether computer programs are capable of genuinely creative activity. Although this notion can be explored as a purely philosophical debate, an alternative perspective is to consider what aspects of the behaviour of a program might be noted or measured in order to arrive at an empirically supported judgement that creativity has occurred. We sketch out, in general abstract terms, what goes on when a potentially creative program is constructed and run, and list some of the relationships (for example, between input and output) which might contribute to a decision about creativity. Specifically, we list a number of criteria which might indicate interesting properties of a program’s behaviour, from the perspective of possible creativity. We go on to review some ways in which these criteria have been applied to actual implementations, and some possible improvements to this way of assessing creativity.