Sustainable Creativity: Overcoming the Challenge of Scale When Repurposing Wind-Turbine Blades

Abstract

With the growing adoption of wind-energy technology to help address climate change, we must now also consider the disposition of retired wind-turbine blades, which are not easily recycled. This pressing environmental problem was used as the prompt in a creativity study, where participants were asked to identify potential reuses in a wind-turbine-blade repurposing task (WRT). In past iterations of this study, participants consistently struggled with correctly incorporating the large physical size of wind-turbine blades in their reuse concepts. The Alternate Uses Task (AUT) is an established measure of creativity that involves asking participants to identify uses for common objects like bricks and paper clips. The current work explored whether an AUT can be adapted as an intervention to help overcome the WRT scale challenge so that the appropriateness of reuse concepts can be improved. Students in a fourth-year undergraduate engineering-design course (N = 28) underwent both of two conditions, a scaled-AUT intervention and a typical-AUT control, before the WRT. The results support that a main difficulty with the WRT is object size. Both fluency and flexibility (number and categories of ideas) for the relatively common AUT objects were significantly lower in the scaled AUT than in the typical AUT. However, correctly scaled WRT concepts significantly increased after the scaled AUT, supporting the intervention's effectiveness. While motivated by the real-world problem that decommissioned wind-turbine blades present, the current work focuses on conceptual design and creativity, where incorporating real-world problems may provide value beyond more typical AUTs, which have fewer real-world applications. Thus, for future work, the WRT is proposed as a standard design-study task whose solutions help address a real-world problem.