Innovator. Educator. Entrepreneur.
Peter Childs FREng is the co-director of the Energy Futures Lab and professorial lead in engineering design at Imperial College London.
His general interests include creativity tools and innovation, design, fluid flow and heat transfer, sustainable energy and robotics.
He was the founding head of school of the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London, and prior to Imperial was director of the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre for Aero-Thermal Systems, director of InQbate and professor at the University of Sussex.
He has contributed to over 200 journal and conference papers, and several books including the Handbook on Mechanical Design Engineering (Elsevier, 2019) as well as co-authoring books on temperature, rotating flow and rural urban migration. He has been principal or co-investigator on contracts totalling over £80 million.
His roles at Imperial include professor at large for the Innovation Design Engineering double masters degree run jointly by Imperial and the Royal College of Art. He is editor of the Journal of Power and Energy, founder director at QBot Ltd and director and chairperson at BladeBUG Ltd.
LATEST WORK
The Creativity Diamond Framework
The creativity diamond is a framework developed to aid users in the selection of an approach to augment creativity and creative thinking in divergent and convergent phases of a challenge or opportunity.
The framework has arisen from a review of over 20 PhD theses on creativity, design, innovation, and product development, which in turn build on their respective domain literature reviews.
The framework promotes several forms of brainstorming, a series of systematic approaches to creativity, and several thinking and reasoning approaches.
To accompany the framework, several resources have been developed, including up-skilling materials and selection tools to aid identification of an approach at a given stage.
The framework has been introduced across several degree programs at Imperial and other universities, as well as in industry, through a massive online open course.
Table 1. Short description and merits/limitations of various creativity tools and approaches to thinking.
Table 2. Creativity approach attributes.
CREATIVE THINKING TOOLS FOR SUCCESS AND LEADERSHIP SPECIALISATION (MOOC)
Creative thinking programme achieves milestone of enrolling 400,000 learners.
Launched in 2018, the MOOC (massively open online course) has been developed and refined by Imperial on the digital education platforms, Coursera and EdX. Over that timeframe anyone with an internet connection has been able to learn from some of the world’s top researchers and practitioners in creative thinking.
Both the previous and new series of courses are fully accessible across the world and support learners in developing their creative thinking skills and developing ideas quickly and at scale.
Thank you to the many companies and organisations that have supported my work.
