John E. Arnold

John Edward Arnold (March 14, 1913 – September 28, 1963) was an American Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Professor of Business Administration at Stanford University. He was a pioneer in scientifically defining and advancing inventiveness, based on the psychology of creative thinking and imagination.

John Arnold was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He received the B.A. Psychology in 1934 from the University of Minnesota and a M.S. Mechanical Engineering in 1940 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Subsequently, he served in industry as a mechanical designer and research engineer. He taught at MIT from 1942 to 1957 and was the founder, director, and sole member of MIT's “Creative Engineering Laboratory".

In the 1950s Arnold sought to shift the meaning of design from being “the language used to tell fabrication and assembly where to make their cuts” to “the language of innovation,” by which engineers expressed their imagination. He moved to Stanford University in 1957 with a joint appointment as Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Professor of Business Administration. He was founding Director of the Design Division of the Mechanical Engineering Department, continuing to formulate and teach about creativity in engineering. He died at the age of 50 of a heart attack while traveling in Italy on sabbatical; he had planned to write a book on the philosophy of engineering.

Arnold taught summer seminars in creativity for manufacturing engineers, military researchers, and industrial designers (1953-1956 at MIT and continuing at Stanford). The 1956 summer program was particularly influential, including a presentation by R. Buckminster Fuller on the “comprehensive designer,” J. P. Guilford’s concept of measuring and developing creativity, and A. H. Maslow’s “Emotional Blocks to Creativity,” with considerable attention given to Alex Faickney Osborn’s notion of “brainstorming."

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