Notes on Engineering Health, July 2022: On Creativity

In order to capture the awe-inspiring photographs recently taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA scientists and engineers spent 30 years and $10 billion figuring out how to tightly pack dozens of mechanical limbs and instruments into a package that could be safely delivered to the second Lagrange Point, almost one million miles from the Earth in the exact opposite direction from the sun, and then carefully unfolded and deployed. This effort included a complex origami structure for a 21-foot-wide array of 18 gold-plated mirrors designed to bounce light from the cosmos into the telescope’s ultra-sensitive infrared sensors, as well as a tennis court-sized sunshield made up of five layers of a thin foil-like plastic folded tightly together. The flawless deployment of this complex set of systems was required in order to capture light emitted 13.7 billion years ago, just 100 million years following the Big Bang itself. This astounding engineering feat and the stirring beauty of the resulting pictures blur the line between rational and creative thinking.

How can we describe creative processes? How should we encourage them to take place? And how do they play a role at the intersection of science and engineering?

More than 60 different definitions of creativity can be found in the psychological literature. Perhaps the most widespread conception of creativity in the scholarly literature is that creativity is found in the production of a creative work (for example, a new work of art or a scientific hypothesis) that is both "novel" and "useful."

Graham Wallas, in his work Art of Thought, published in 1926, delineated one of the first models of the creative process. Wallas thought creativity was a legacy of the evolutionary process that allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments. In the Wallas stage model, creative insights may be explained by a process consisting of five stages:

Preparation
Preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions,

Incubation
The problem is internalized into the subconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening,

Intimation
The problem solver gets a "feeling" that a solution is on its way,

Illumination or Insight
The creative idea moves from its subconscious processing into conscious awareness; and

Verification
The idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied.


Building on work related to the idea of divergent production, Ellis Paul Torrance developed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking in 1974 in which he described four types of cognitive aptitudes:

Fluency
The total number of interpretable, meaningful, and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus,

Flexibility
The number of different categories of relevant responses,

Originality
The statistical rarity of such responses), and

Elaboration
The amount of detail in such responses.


An additional meta-cognitive trait, which is often underrated, is the ability to allow oneself to transgress rules thereby imagining out-of-the-box ideas.

Neither Wallas’ process, nor Torrance’s aptitudes are in any way innate. Instead, they can be learned, enhanced, or tempered.

A recent study conducted by researchers at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis and published in the Journal of Applied Psychology discovered that rewarding first-time producers of successful novel ideas with an award or recognition can significantly decrease the likelihood that they will produce future creative work. Through both a retrospective analysis and a prospective study, they discovered that awards tended to fix the creators’ identity in the “creative type,” which put additional pressure on the awardee to maintain their status as a brilliant creator. In response, the awardees more frequently self-censured their ideas for fear of never matching the quality of their first, award-winning opus.

The Olin researchers conclude their paper by suggesting rules for awards that would foster repeated creative behavior rather than blocking it:

1. Ensure the award recognizes both the outcome and the process,
2. Reward both success and learning from failure, and
3. Glorify repeated instances of creative work rather than one occurrence
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It is no coincidence that the James Webb Space Telescope was a government-driven project, and, although there were pressures around time and budget, NASA successfully played the role of the greater fool, adopting a view long enough to allow room for the enormous creativity necessary to achieve the launch and deployment of the system. Whether it is about packing mirrors into a rocket ship, writing a rule-breaking novel, integrating decentralized networks and renewable energy production systems to prevent further climate disasters, or designing new tools to interrogate the genome or create new chemistries, creativity is a skill and a mindset that needs to be taught and fostered much the same way we teach and support its rational counterpart through STEM courses and degrees. How to support these endeavors while balancing the requirements and goals of private enterprises is the difficult line our industry works on every day.

– Jonathan Friedlander, PhD & Geoffrey W. Smith



First Five
First Five is our curated list of articles, studies, and publications for the month. For our full list of interesting media in health, science, and technology, updated regularly, follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

1/ Computational Tools for drug development
Digitalis Ventures advisor Brian Naughton posted an interesting review of the current state of computational tools for drug development.

2/ Politics & health
A recent paper examined mortality rates and federal and state election data for all counties in the U.S. from 2001 to 2019. The researchers found that there is a growing “mortality gap” between Republican voting counties compared to Democratic voting counties such that counties which elect Republican candidates tend to experience worse health outcomes, such as fewer gains in life expectancy and increased rates of opioid prescription.

3/ Solid, liquid, gas, plasma … & information?
UK-based physicist Melvin Vopson has previously published research suggesting that information has mass and that all elementary particles, the smallest known building blocks of the universe, store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA. Dr. Vopson has now come out with a paper detailing an experiment that would prove that information is the fifth form of matter alongside solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

4/ Bioethics & failure
What happens when the company behind your life changing medical technology fails? This story about Second Sight’s financial troubles and its impact on the patients it was supposed to be serving is a cautionary tale.

5/ More failure
A provocative list on how complex systems fail from an Ohio State University researcher detailing “the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety.”



Digitalis Commons
Public-Interest Technologies for Better Health

Digitalis Commons is a non-profit that partners with groups and individuals striving to address complex health problems by building public-interest technology solutions that are frontier-advancing, open-access, and scalable.

A recent article in The New Yorker provides a fascinating view into the real costs of consumption taking into account “externalities”—the costs, often environmental and social, that aren’t figured into transactions

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