Engineering design comprises both creation (creativity, ideation, inspiration) and careful synthesis and analysis. Design knowledge spans many fields of applied science, social science, and business.
Design is the transformation or mapping process from the functional domain to the physical domain, which satisfies the stated functional requirements within identified constraints.
Successful design, a key ingredient of wealth generation, should be based on comprehensive information about the design options, constraints, and trade-offs. Timeliness and quality are paramount, and this must consider various life cycle and environmental issues. These pressures are intensified with competition, free trade, and globalization. Furthermore, brilliant product and process designs require effective networking and communication as well as good decision making, at both the component and system levels.
Design is at the root of the engineering discipline, and the Latin root of engineering is “ingenerare,” which means “to create.”
Engineering design is a systematic, intelligent process in which engineers generate, evaluate, and specify solutions for devices, systems, or processes whose form(s) and function(s) achieve clients’ objectives and users’ needs while satisfying a specified set of constraints. In other words, engineering design is a thoughtful process for generating plans or schemes for devices, systems, or processes that attain given objectives while adhering to specified constraints.
It is important to recognize that when we are designing devices, systems, and processes, we are designing artifacts: artificial, manmade objects, the “things” or devices that are being designed. They are most often physical objects such as airplanes, wheelchairs, ladders, cell phones, and carburetors. But “paper” products (or their electronic versions) such as drawings, plans, computer software, articles, and books are also artifacts in this sense. In this text we will use device, artifact, or system rather interchangeably as the objects of our design.
With further recourse to our “design dictionary,” we note the following definitions:
- design objective: a feature or behavior that we wish the design to have or exhibit.
- design constraint: a limit or restriction on the features or behaviors of the design. A proposed design is unacceptable if these limits are violated.
- functions: things a designed device or system is supposed to do. Engineering functions almost always involve transforming or transferring energy, information, or material. We view energy transformation or transfer quite broadly: It includes supporting and transmitting forces, the flow of current, the flow of charge, the transfer of material, and so on.
- means: a way or a method to make a function happen. For example, friction is a means of fulfilling a function of applying a braking force.
- form: the shape and structure of something as distinguished from its material. We will not deal with form very much in this book, but form is central to industrial design, a very important part of product design.
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