Visual Literacy and Creativity

It has long been recognized that creativity is an essential quality of the successful engineers. Creativity helps in the generation of new ideas and finding solutions to problems. Also, creativity is required for innovation. Innovation is required in industry to face important challenges according to competetive, economical and sustainability matters.

To face these challenges, engineers must find valuable and inventive solutions. The best way to achieve this is adopting creative strategies. Everyone has a creative potential which can be nurtured. Since people can be more or less creative, it can be fostered, by applying several pedagogic strategies. One of the best approaches is taking into account Visual perception, Visual Thinking and Visual Expression.

It can be easily shown the advantages of using visuals for creative enhancement. Visual thinking activates the side of the brain which leads us for free ideation. Visual representations allow to see clearly connections between ideas and then have a way to find solutions to problems. When people practice analysis tasks, evaluation of visual inputs enhance their creative potential. Visualization shapes new forms and represents in our mind a new scenario that can become a new and original way to overcome a blocking situation. Visual Literacy also has to do with all these abilities for creativity.

Graphics are the common communication channel in engineering. Along with its function as a means of communication, visual representation is an intrinsic part of the design creative process. A typical case is the exploration of ideas using visuals. That means a process were seeing images, creating them and finally drawing operates in a cycle for finding the solution to a defined problem.

Several researchers mention the dialogue between a drawing and the designers, where the sketch “speaks” to him and the designers respond with a new drawing. Visual expression is a key activity in the process of originating new product ideas in engineering. It is understood that a creative approach based on visual means shall be an optimal choice for engineers.

Engineering education must be aware of the need teach as well as to practice Visual Literacy being shown to its benefits for ideation and problem-solving skills and innovation competences.