Design And Research: Two Sides Of The Same Coin

Dr. Amaresh Chakrabarti, Chairperson of the Centre for Product Design & Manufacturing at IISc Bangalore shares his thoughts on how to solve the unemployment issue of engineering graduates…

- Dr. Amresh Chakrabarti

According to Wikipedia, employability can be defined as ‘doing value-creating work, getting paid for it and learning at the same time, enhancing the ability to get the work done in the future’. Based on my experience of being in academia for over 36 years, I find that the following six skills are crucial to gain a meaningful employment...

Creativity

Creativity is a combination of original thinking, decision making, and problem-solving. Original thinking is flexible thinking: the ability to see things differently than usual. It involves deliberately imposing or relaxing constraints, challenging and reworking assumptions, and seeing and removing conflicts. Decision making, involves the ability to identify criteria and their relative importance, decision alternatives and how well they perform against each criterion. It is also the ability to aggregate these individual performances to decide on the overall performance of the alternatives so that the best among these can be identified. Problem solving, which includes understanding and solving of the problem, requires original thinking and decision making, and the knowledge of the process of solving the problem. This typically involves identifying problems, developing ideas to solve each one, combining and consolidating these into solutions, and evaluating and selecting among the options.

Motivation

Motivation is the amalgamation of three curiosity, empathy, and positive attitude. Curiosity is the attitude of questioning: asking the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ for everything around us.