Intuition is the ability to understand something at an instinctual level, without having to consciously reason about it. Intuition can be highly valuable for engineers, as it helps them to identify optimal solutions under significant time constraints or when only limited resources are available. 

For instance, based on challenges they have encountered before, engineers could intuitively identify flaws with a system and identify strategies that could improve performance. While intuition is a central part of engineering, it is considered by some to be an innate ability. However, it is widely agreed upon that intuition develops as engineers gain hands-on experience in the field.

Helping engineering students to develop and fine-tune their intuition has the potential to better equip these future engineers to tackle humanity’s increasingly complex challenges. Towards this aim, Dr Elif Miskioğlu, Dr Kaela Martin and Dr Adam Carberry utilised their combined expertise and knowledge to develop new tools to enhance our understanding of engineering-related intuition.

This enhanced understanding would enable the researchers and engineering educators everywhere to develop targeted educational experiences that can foster intuition, and to teach students how to leverage their intuition to solve complex problems.

First, however, the research team needed to develop methods that could reliably assess intuition. Past studies had already assessed intuition in the fields of nursing, business management, and law. This led Miskioğlu, Martin and Carberry to compare intuition-related views shared by experienced engineers with those of nurses and business managers.

The researchers identified common themes related to the use of intuition in decision-making across these three disciplines. For instance, they found that participants associated intuition with decisions made in ambiguous situations and under time constraints. Participants also highlighted risks associated with making intuitive choices, along with factors that could inhibit their use of intuition, such as the fear of making a poor decision, and factors that encouraged intuition, such as a supportive workplace environment.

They also mentioned the role of professional experience and learning in the ability to make intuitive choices. Overall, they defined intuition as a ‘sense of knowing’ that guides decision-making in their professional endeavours.

Miskioğlu, Martin, and Carberry then recruited 17 engineering professionals with at least 6 years of experience in the field. They prepared a series of interview questions with the aim of better understanding engineering intuition and how it manifests in the workplace. The experienced engineers were interviewed and asked to share their views on how they developed their expertise, navigated their engineering roles, and viewed engineering intuition.

By analysing the interviews, the researchers gained important insight into what defines ‘engineering intuition’. Most interviewees reported that intuition allowed them to assess present situations and predict future outcomes. This suggests that intuition is a problem-solving skill that guides engineers in the process of devising desirable solutions to problems.

In 2021, the research team developed a new definition of what they refer to as ‘engineering intuition’ based on their emergent findings. They suggest that the type of intuition that proves valuable in engineering primarily consists of intuitively assessing whether engineering solutions are feasible and predicting the outcomes associated with a given engineering scenario.

Using these results, Miskioğlu, Martin and Carberry devised ‘LITES’, which stands for Leveraging Intuition Toward Engineering Solutions. LITES is a framework that characterises engineering intuition. The LITES framework includes nine themes defining how engineering intuition is used, which are divided into three broader categories: external factors, problem-solving approaches, and internal factors.

External factors include constraints, which limit the problem-solving process, and outcomes, which describe the results of this process.

The problem-solving approaches category includes five themes – physiological responses, experience, data-based assessment, holistic prediction, and sensibility check – which together comprise intuition. Physiological responses are ‘gut feelings’ – physical sensations or emotions that tell engineers whether or not something will work. Experience helps engineers to solve a specific problem if they encountered similar problems in the past.

Data-based assessment is a problem-solving approach that relies on available evidence, while holistic prediction involves assessing a problem by looking at the ‘bigger picture’ or considering all relevant factors as a whole. A sensibility check, in contrast, entails consciously or subconsciously reviewing different possible solutions to a problem to determine if they are ‘reasonable’.

Finally, the internal factors included in the LITES framework are individual mindsets, meaning engineers’ unique perspectives, and individual conditions, describing factors that uniquely impact an engineer’s ability to solve problems. Internal factors determine whether an individual is comfortable using their intuition.

The researchers’ framework captures how engineering intuition is used in problem-solving, and reveals how the elements of intuition support the development of effective solutions to complex problems.

Using the insights they had gathered, Miskioğlu, Martin and Carberry developed a questionnaire to evaluate engineering problem-solving in educational settings. They named it PEEPS, which stands for Predicting and Evaluating Engineering Problem Solving.

PEEPS presents students with a series of problems to solve and assesses how they devise solutions. In 2021, the researchers recruited engineering students and asked them to complete the survey. By analysing the responses, the team found that participants who correctly solved the problems tended to be more confident in their answers, suggesting that they were self-aware of their knowledge.

The recent work by Miskioğlu, Martin and Carberry highlights the key role of intuition in the field of engineering, suggesting that fostering this ability could greatly benefit engineering students. The team has already developed the LITES framework describing engineering intuition and the PEEPS survey  that attempts to measure engineering intuition in academic settings.

They plan to further evaluate the potential of these tools and develop additional approaches in larger studies of practicing and future engieners. This could enable the use of their tools for assessing students’ engineering intuition before and after taking part in interventions designed to foster this highly valuable ability.

The team’s work will also inform the development of such interventions designed to foster intuition in prospective engineers, towards cultivating a new generation of intuitive engineers who are better equipped to tackle 21^st Century challenges.