Engineering Design Certificate Rationale
The Nature of Engineering Design
The practice of design has changed over the last three decades, and it is now widely viewed by professionals as a social process with a series of stages that vary somewhat with the nature of the design and the approaches taken by the design teams. For each stage, a variety of tools and methods is available. There are still many who believe in the lone designer who has a bright idea and does a lot of analysis and testing, or the seasoned veteran in industry who keeps doing it until he or she becomes good at it by virtue of experience. The new paradigm embraces both experience and the role of individuals in producing ideas, but design, even innovative design, is now considered teachable and best done in social processes. Further, naming design practices of the applied skills within majors such as machine design or the design of steel structures is not affected by the new paradigm, although they may benefit from adopting some new tools in say concept generation or concept selection. But, obviously, they should still be called “machine design,” etc.
The new paradigm applies to the increasingly frequent use of design in interdisciplinary settings and the use of a core set of methods and tools. There are now dozens of textbooks in engineering design that embrace this approach, and many research journals dedicated to advancing core methods and tools in design as well as interdisciplinary design such as design for the environment/sustainable design, design for human variability, and industrial design. Thus, “engineering design” can be, and increasingly is, used to refer to design that means,
1. The interdisciplinary integration of the ideas, disciplines, people, and resources within engineering and beyond in a defined social design process that develops solutions for products, systems, processes, and services.
2. A design process that follows the definition of engineering design in ABET Criterion 3c; “an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability.” So, in application, the design process is interdisciplinary in context.
- A set of tools and methods that have application to design in most engineering disciplines, which means teaching design as process and treating content as a variable.
The Need for Engineering Design
According to the surveys of recent engineering graduates carried out by the College of Engineering biennially for over a decade, the percentage reporting design, and design related, responsibilities is well over half and growing. Of these trends, specific responsibilities in design are showing the greatest change in responsibility since the first survey. Here are the data for cohorts 1993–2000.
Percentage of alumni reporting design & design related responsibilities 1993 - 2000 |
||
Activity |
1993 |
2000 |
Work in teams |
83% |
98% |
Solve problems |
85% |
98% |
Computer-aided design |
37% |
47% |
Ensure compliance with codes and standards |
53% |
69% |
Modeling and simulation |
22% |
42% |
Test products or product components |
29% |
52% |
Design products or product components |
22% |
52% |
Research studies have found that companies that do design well are much more successful than the average company. Arguably, students who develop more ability in design may find jobs more easily, in more successful companies, and possibly at a higher pay than they otherwise would. They should also have good productivity skills, and enjoy better lifetime earnings. A certificate in engineering design is a modest intervention that would allow us to test these propositions by tracking those who attain the certificate through the interview process and their first job.
The Engineering Design Program (EDP) is home to a uniquely dedicated group of about 20 engineering faculty who teach, research, and practice engineering design. This includes 6 affiliate faculty members representing four other departments and this list is growing.
- They offer design courses from the first year to graduate studies and off-site training in design methods.
- It is an interdisciplinary base that includes all engineering fields, and beyond, while being constrained by none.
- The EDP faculty recognizes the multidisciplinary nature of modern systems and products, the need for innovation in the design of them, and the need for graduating students better equipped for design responsibilities that make their employers more competitive and more productive.
- The EDP faculty further recognizes the need for research to advance the methods and tools in engineering design and the transfer of these tools into the practice of engineering design.
Strengths of the EDP are the award winning first-year course, EDSGN 100 (formerly ED&G 100): Introduction to Engineering Design, and a series of 400- and 500-level courses: systems design, innovative design with TRIZ, design cognition (decision making), design for human variability, global design with worldwide partners, innovative integrated product design, sustainable design, service design, and client-based design project experiences. The EDP has been steadily recruiting faculty from nationally ranked schools of engineering who specialize in design, while adding affiliate faculty from many engineering departments. The faculty are increasingly successful in acquiring external funding for design research from NSF, and from other public and industry sources.
This proposal for a certificate in engineering design represents the first time a system of formal recognition of design specialization (a resume entry) has been offered to students in the College of Engineering.