Introduction

This course looks at the process of design – from assessing the complexity of design as an activity, to exposing the difficulty in making general conclusions about how designers work. You will be able to identify innovation in a wide variety of designed objects and evaluate the impact of this innovation.

Course learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• recognize that functional artifacts have had input from a designer, with greater and lesser degrees of engineering input
• identify that engineering designers work within constraints of finance, materials properties, desired functionality, human factors, etc.
• understand that design exploits model of the product being designed, whether those models are physical mock-ups, computer-based models, or mathematical models which explore an element of the product’s performance
• understand that there is rarely a unique solution to any design problem. Part of the skill of a designer is in finding a problem-solution pair, and the best compromise
• understand how models of the design process are formulated, and how they can be applied to understand the development of a particular product or product family.