John E. Arnold

Starting in 1962, Arnold also taught Engineering Drawing, the "study and application of the language of vision as it applies to the engineer and scientist", as part of the general Engineering School curriculum. Because of his sabbatical in 1963, it was the only course he was scheduled to teach in 1963–64. Following Arnold's philosophy, in this year McKim started to offer a Design Project course that emphasized "the cross-discipline responsibilities of the designer"; follow-on semesters emphasized "economic and marketing determinants" and experimentation, leading to a working prototype.

Starting in 1960, Arnold added a senior colloquium to his courses; it was intended particularly for students not in the Mechanical Engineering Department. This course, How to Ask a Question, was based on the claim that "Each of man's advances was started by a question. ... Knowing what questions to ask and how to ask them is sometimes more important than the eventual answers."

During the Creativity Conference of 1958, participants debated the role of the individual versus the group in the creative process. Arnold's philosophy of creativity and design emphasized the individual because "Every new combination of values ... is formed in the mind of an individual man." While acknowledging that some engineering activities are best undertaken as a group activity to get feedback for ideas, he was critical of research directors who brought engineers together without concern for their individual competence. Accordingly, he advocated personal development first and foremost, providing guidelines for self-reflection and idea generation, a form of metacognition.

During 1958–1963 Arnold taught graduate courses that viewed design more generally. Philosophy of Design emphasized the nature of the creative process and factors that influenced it. The course discussed the designer's "attitudes and viewpoints" and the "techniques of analysis, synthesis and evaluation". Human Factors in Design concerned "Man's strength and weaknesses in opposition to and/or in cooperation with machines", including "the transfer of information, energy, and matter between man and machine". Comprehensive Design was a seminar about actual design practice; it stressed "imagination tempered with sound engineering analysis and judgment".

In his first two school years at Stanford University (1957–59), Arnold introduced and taught Mechanical Engineering Design, subsequently taught by others. Following the formation of the Design Division by Arnold, related courses were added by Robert McKim, Rapid Visualization and Product Design.

Appointed in 1955 as MIT's first educational television coordinator, he directed the program for two years, involving more than a hundred broadcasts. He was also President of the MIT Faculty Club and participated in the MIT Science Fiction Society.

Arnold taught summer seminars in creativity for manufacturing engineers, military researchers, and industrial designers (1953–1956 at MIT and continuing at Stanford). The 1956 summer program was particularly influential, including a presentation by R. Buckminster Fuller on the "comprehensive designer", J. P. Guilford's concept of measuring and developing creativity, and A. H. Maslow's "Emotional Blocks to Creativity", with considerable attention given to Alex Faickney Osborn's notion of "brainstorming".

Arnold's philosophy of design was first formulated and taught in "Creative Engineering" courses at MIT in the 1951–52 school year. He developed a case study called Arcturus IV that gained considerable attention in the public press, but its humanistic perspective was new and controversial. The New York Times obituary stated that Arnold's "highly imaginative classroom methods to stimulate creative thinking ... caused a stir among traditional educators and conservative engineering leaders."

In the 1950s Arnold sought to shift the meaning of design from being "the language used to tell fabrication and assembly where to make their cuts" to "the language of innovation", by which engineers expressed their imagination. He moved to Stanford University in 1957 with a joint appointment as professor of mechanical engineering and professor of business administration. He was founding director of the Design Division of the Mechanical Engineering Department, continuing to formulate and teach about creativity in engineering. He died at the age of 50 of a heart attack while traveling in Italy on sabbatical; he had planned to write a book on the philosophy of engineering.

Arnold was well known for applying and devising heuristics for studying a problem and generating novel engineering solutions. By the late 1950s, a literature search on the subject of creativity would lead to his contributions. Basing design processes and teaching about design on psychology and contextual factors, Arnold demonstrated how the scientific method could be applied for improving creativity.

John Arnold was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He received the B.A. in psychology in 1934 from the University of Minnesota and a M.S. in mechanical engineering in 1940 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Subsequently, he served in industry as a mechanical designer and research engineer. He taught at MIT from 1942 to 1957 and was the founder, director, and sole member of MIT's "Creative Engineering Laboratory".

After graduating from college in 1934 and unable to find a job as a psychologist, he worked as a night watchman in an oil plant. Reading the technical reports laying about, he became interested in engineering. This motivated him to become part owner of a garage, where he gained practical knowledge and confidence to get a job as an assistant designer for a company making industrial machinery. That experience convinced him that he needed to learn the mechanical principles that made devices work, leading to acquiring an MIT engineering master's degree, which he completed in three years.

John Edward Arnold (né Paulsen; March 14, 1913 – September 28, 1963) was an American professor of mechanical engineering and professor of business administration at Stanford University. He was a pioneer in scientifically defining and advancing inventiveness, based on the psychology of creative thinking and imagination, and an internationally recognized innovator in educational philosophy.