Creativity, complexity and self‐similarity: The vision of the fractal university

Creativity and communication processes in engineering education have become more and more necessary in highly complex structures such as technological networks and ‘virtual’ reality. These issues also include an educational challenge for university: all education for the future has to be based on experiencing reality. A new socio‐technical approach describes the engineering profession in all aspects beside technology, such as tasks, views, organizational structures or cooperation. Therefore, university and higher education have to change into self-similar structures to support the learning of complexity in real life. The experiences of the Department of Computer Science in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Technology in Aachen, as a socio‐technical, self‐similar and creative system, show such learning processes of students (and staff) in undergraduate education, research and organizational structures.