Deploying Creativity for Good: How Engineers Solve Worthy Problems

The renewed focus on the importance and necessity of creativity resulting from the growth of AI, and concerns about the future of work, brings a renewed focus on questions of how creativity is developed (i.e., taught) and how it is deployed. Recent scholarship on the dark side of creativity has, however, added a novel dimension to this issue. In order to understand how any domain or discipline—not least engineering—develops and deploys creativity for good, it is first necessary to understand that creativity can be bad. Under this revised view of creativity, development and deployment is therefore shaped by two main focuses: (a) what matters for creativity and how this is fostered, and (b) the role of intent, impulse, and influence, and how moral and ethical factors drive these. This chapter explores these issues in the domain of engineering, concluding that the key to the development and deployment of creativity for good, in engineering, is not the ethical and moral dimension, which are generally well understood, but actually the development of creativity as a core competency.