DOUGLAS STOUT PRIMING THE CREATIVE SPARK COMES QUITE NATURALLY TO INVENTIVE BYU DESIGN DEPARTMENT CHAIRMAN

Being a design engineer makes Douglas Stout happy.

He has far too much to do, and far too little time to do it. His mind is racing a mile a minute, toying with new projects and improvements on the old. And he wouldn't have it any other way.Stout was recently appointed chairman of the design department at Brigham Young University - a position that comes naturally to him, since he has chaired that department before, and once headed the art department at BYU.

His is a thriving, even over-crowded department. "We have 650 majors, and 850 students," he said, "and we really must find a way to cut back.

"There are always a great many competition winners among our students, and the rate of employment for our graduates is 90 percent. They branch out everywhere; if they stay here in Utah, we've failed," he added cheerfully.

Stout takes a broad view of his specialty. "Any artist is a designer. To take the unorganized and organize it is to be a designer.

"God is God because of his ability to create, and creativity is our birthright. The more knowledge we put into ourselves, the better we will be able to create later, when we reach into the unknown and put the elements together, to solve a problem with knowledge and originality.

"No one creates in a void," he philosophized. "We all work with some sort of materials. Artists organize paint on canvas, or organize clay into a pot, or mold a sculpture. Musicians organize notes into compositions. The common denominator is organizing in a new way, never done before.

"In my department, we focus on visual design," he explained, "learning to organize the space around us, and the things in that space.

"We seek to remove all layers of negativism, of self-limiting thinking from our students. High schools teach what is already known, so people can get through the mechanics of living. In college we strip away the pragmatic, and give the skills and ideas to be creative, to investigate the unknown. In this department we teach a basic approach to design that will serve in any imaginable situation later."

Stout believes quite simply that you learn to be creative by being creative. "Think of any other learned activity - walking, talking, swimming, climbing; you learn by doing," he said. Accordingly, students in his basic design class get a problem during the first session.

This term the assignment was to redesign eating utensils, which brought forth a variety of solutions - some mere redundancies on a theme, others that showed a spark of improvement in grace and convenience.