Engineering Design: A Project-Based Introduction, Fourth Edition

FOREWORD*

To design is to imagine and specify things that don't exist, usually with the aim of bringing them into the world. The “things” may be tangible—machines and buildings and bridges; they may be procedures—the plans for a marketing scheme or an organization or a manufacturing process, or for solving a scientific research problem by experiment; they may be works of art—paintings or music or sculpture. Virtually every professional activity has a large component of design, although usually combined with the tasks of bringing the designed things into the real world.

Design has been regarded as an art, rather than a science. A science proceeds by laws, which can sometimes even be written in mathematical form. It tells you how things must be, what constraints they must satisfy. An art proceeds by heuristic, rules of thumb, and “intuition” to search for new things that meet certain goals, and at the same time meet the constraints of reality, the laws of the relevant underlying sciences. No gravity shields; no perpetual motion machines.

For many years after World War II, science was steadily replacing design in the engineering college curricula, for we knew how to teach science in an academically respectable, that is, rigorous and formal, way. We did not think we knew how to teach an art. Consequently, the drawing board disappeared from the engineering laboratory—if, indeed, a laboratory remained. Now we have the beginnings—more than the beginnings, a solid core—of a science of ...