Design Engineering Journey

Book excerpt: This book provides an introductory treatment of the design methodology for undergraduate students in multiple disciplines. It introduces the principles of design, and discusses design tools and techniques from traditional and multidisciplinary perspectives and comprehensively explores the design engineering process. Innovation, creativity, design thinking, collaboration, communication, problem solving, and technical skills are increasingly being identified as key skills for practicing engineers in tackling today's complex design problems. Design Engineering Journey addresses the need for a design textbook that teaches these skills. It presents a broad multidisciplinary perspective to design that encourages students to be innovative and open to new ideas and concepts while also drawing on traditional design methods and strategies. For example, students are provided with design solutions inspired by nature as well as the arts to nurture their creative problem solving skills. This book provides an overview from establishing need to ideation of concepts and realization techniques and prototyping, presented in an engaging and visually appealing manner, incorporating multidisciplinary examples that aim to reinforce the student's evolving design knowledge. The technical level of this book is kept at an introductory level so that freshman and sophomore students should be able to understand and solve a variety of design problems and come up with innovative concepts, and realize them through prototype and testing. This book also can serve as a reference text for senior capstone design projects, and the readers will find that the examples and scenarios presented are representative of problems faced by professional designers in engineering.