Strategy to Stimulate Student’s Creativity in Design through Subject of Engineering Design in Department of Mechanical Engineering of Andalas University

This paper investigates application of several design techniques to stimulate student’s creativity in design of engineering products. The first technique is creative methods,such as brainstorming, synetics, enlarging the search space, while the second technique is rational methods such as objective tree, function analysis, quality function deployment, morphological chart, weighted objective and value engineering method. Both techniques have been previously taught in the subject of Engineering Design, one of required subject in Department of Mechanical Engineering of Andalas University, for 3rd year students.All methods above, whether creative methods or rational methods,theoretically could be used to stimulate the creativity of the students in the design process. The creativity is assessed through application of analytical rubrics in four criteria of assesment. Those are variety of ideas and context, variety of sources, combining ideas, and communicating something new. The result shows that under scale of 1 to 4, the level creativity for four criteria of assessment are 2.93, 2.79, 2.5 and 2.15 respectively. In general, the average level of creativity is 2.59, somewhere between category of Creative (Scale 3) and Ordinary (Scale 2).