Keywords: visual thinking, inventive design, design concept, functional neuroanatomy.

Global warming and population growth combine to present unprecedented challenges to society and to the civil engineers who must develop solutions for greater society. At the time of such need, however, the civil engineering profession and education has devolved from a highly creative endeavour to a workmanlike implementation of well-practiced procedures and protocols. This pedestrianization of civil engineering has made the profession unprepared for coming challenges.

In order to allow the civil engineering profession to create innovative solutions to the unprecedented challenges posed by climate change and overpopulation, the authors propose in this article to develop a systematic approach to engineering creativity. This approach will draw upon state of the art engineering, mathematics, and neuroscience. Furthermore, the ultimate result will be a method that can be systematized, taught, and used to develop a new generation of design tools.

This chapter describes the concept of visual thinking, and proposes to use visual thinking as a foundation for developing an explicit process for inventive design. An extensive example of an engineering challenge of designing a temporary floodwall is provided. Original drawings are used to illustrate how visualization in an engineering context allows the designer to see various perspectives of the individual design aspects. Also, an original mathematical model for understanding the process of inventive designing is discussed. This model provides a formalism by which we may capture and describe with precision the steps in the process of inventive design. Also, the brain systems that support the processes of creativity and visual thinking are described. The purpose of the discussion of functional neuroanatomy in the context of visual design is to take the discussion of the brain's processes leading to invention beyond the relatively simplistic level of a "left brain/right brain" dichotomy.

This chapter represents the beginnings of a synthesis of engineering, mathematics and neuroscience to improve our understanding of visual thinking in inventive design and to create a formal method for designing and for the teaching of an inventive design process. In future work, the authors will build a convergent structure upon these initial connections that will provide a framework for inventive design that is both holistic and practical.

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