The Design Engineer

The Design Engineer’s Professional Responsibilities

In general, the design engineer is required to satisfy the needs of customers (management, clients, consumers, etc.) and is expected to do so in a competent, responsible, ethical, and professional manner. Much of engineering course work and practical experience focuses on competence, but when does one begin to develop engineering responsibility and professionalism? To start on the road to success, you should start to develop these characteristics early in your educational program. You need to cultivate your professional work ethic and process skills before graduation, so that when you begin your formal engineering career, you will be prepared to meet the challenges.

Systematic Approach

Careful attention to the following action steps will help you to organize your solution processing technique.

• Understand the problem. Problem definition is probably the most significant step in the engineering design process. Carefully read, understand, and refine the problem statement.
• Identify the knowns. From the refined problem statement, describe concisely what information is known and relevant.
• Identify the unknowns and formulate the solution strategy. State what must be determined, in what order, so as to arrive at a solution to the problem. Sketch the component or system under investigation, identifying known and unknown parameters. Create a flowchart of the steps necessary to reach the final solution. The steps may require the use of free-body diagrams; material properties from tables; equations from first principles, textbooks, or handbooks relating the known and unknown parameters; experimentally or numerically based charts; specific computational tools.
• State all assumptions and decisions. Real design problems generally do not have unique, ideal, closed-form solutions. Selections, such as the choice of materials, and heat treatments, require decisions. Analyses require assumptions related to the modeling of the real components or system. All assumptions and decisions should be identified and recorded.
• Analyze the problem. Using your solution strategy in conjunction with your decisions and assumptions, execute the analysis of the problem. Reference the sources of all equations, tables, charts, software results, etc. Check the credibility of your results. Check the order of magnitude, dimensionality, trends, signs, etc.
• Evaluate your solution. Evaluate each step in the solution, noting how changes in strategy, decisions, assumptions, and execution might change the results, in positive or negative ways. Whenever possible, incorporate the positive changes in your final solution.
• Present your solution. Here is where your communication skills are important. At this point, you are selling yourself and your technical abilities. If you cannot skillfully explain what you have done, some or all of your work may be misunderstood and unaccepted. Know your audience.