Teaching creativity in a technological design context

We want to teach creativity techniques to prospective technological designers in a domainindependent way. To facilitate this, we adopt a format and nomenclature that is close to the terminology used by engineers. Central notions are concepts, attributes and values. A crucial role is played by, what we call, productive attributes: attributes that come with a set of values that can easily be enumerated. In this paper we show how this format supports several creativity techniques and how it allows engineers to explore option spaces in a structured manner. We briefly discuss some practical experiences with our approach.