The Art of the Possible

In the competitive global marketplace, the difference between a soaring success—like a highly efficient hybrid car or a seamlessly intuitive digital device—and a costly catastrophe—like a bridge collapse or a major environmental spill—is often invisible to the public. It is embedded not in the final materials, but in the methodical, often iterative, decision-making process that shapes the product from its inception. This systematic pathway is known as the design engineering journey.

The ability to design is a profound skill, described by experts as being both a science and an art. The scientific aspect is disciplined; it is learned through the application of a systematic design methodology, problem-solving techniques, and rigorous experiential learning. Engineering design is formally defined as the process of devising a system, component, or process to meet desired needs, fundamentally being a decision-making process that applies the basic sciences, mathematics, and engineering sciences to convert resources optimally toward a stated objective. The artistic side, however, is gained through practice, allowing the engineer to integrate creative and imaginative skills with scientific principles to develop designs that are not only efficient but also aesthetically appealing and practical for human use. Good design skills, therefore, are learned best by “doing”—by engaging in firsthand experiences that develop and test solutions to real-world problems.

For engineering curricula evaluated by organizations like the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), the curriculum must incorporate key elements of design. These fundamental elements include: the establishment of objectives and criteria; synthesis (combining parts to form a whole); analysis (breaking down the system); construction; testing; and, finally, evaluation. Furthermore, a proper engineering design component must encourage student creativity and require the use of open-ended problems, promoting the development and use of a formal design methodology. It must mandate the formulation of detailed problem statements and specifications, the consideration of alternative solutions, and realistic constraints. Crucially, engineers must include constraints that extend far beyond technical performance, such as economic factors, safety, reliability, aesthetics, and social impacts.

The overall objective of this sophisticated process is to create a product, process, or system that provides a clear benefit to society while simultaneously generating an economic benefit for the producers. In modern, customer-oriented societies, consumers demand products that function exceptionally well, are affordable, are aesthetically appealing, and, increasingly, are sustainable. To compete in this accelerated, 21st-century global marketplace, companies must be intensely efficient in the design of new products. It is the effectiveness and efficiency of the design process itself that ultimately determines the success of new product development.

Today’s consumer products are often so complex—a simple personal DVD player, for example, contains intricately designed components like motors, lasers, gears, switches, and optics—that product development efforts require a multidisciplinary team of people with diverse expertise. The resulting complexity and large number of people involved in these multidisciplinary projects mandate an even greater need for protocols and infrastructure to ensure ongoing, consistent communication, thereby guaranteeing that no critical aspect is overlooked and that customer satisfaction is maintained.

The Four Pillars of Quality

From the perspective of companies and their investors, the effectiveness of a product design is measured against four essential characteristics:

  1. Quality: This is defined from the customer’s point of view. Does the product satisfy the stated needs? Is it robust, reliable, and aesthetically pleasing, and does it come with an acceptable selling price?
  2. Cost: This pertains to the financial feasibility. What is the manufacturing cost per unit, and how much profit can the company expect after factoring in marketing, sales, and discounts?
  3. Time to Market: In a hyper-competitive environment, speed is paramount. This measures how quickly the design team can transition the product from its initial concept phase to the final market release. Depending on the product type, this can range from less than a year to three years or more for complex systems, such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
  4. Impact—Social and Environmental: This captures the broader societal footprint. What is the design’s effect on society, and what is the environmental impact—is it sustainable and eco-friendly—throughout the product’s entire life cycle?

A failure in any of these four criteria often traces back to the initial design process.

85%

Failures may stem from a poor understanding of the original problem, poor choices of materials (e.g., plastic instead of metal), making unrealistic assumptions, adopting incorrect design specifications, or faulty manufacturing resulting from poor quality control or large tolerances. Ultimately, failure occurs when a design no longer meets the intended function and user needs, or fails to satisfy stakeholder requirements.

Case Studies in Catastrophe: The Roots of Failure

Design engineers must learn from history by understanding the common reasons behind design failures and incorporating these lessons into their processes. Throughout history, the answer to the question of why some designs fail is often related to the complexity of the design and whether all requirements were ultimately met. The primary causes of engineering failures are grouped into five major categories:

  1. Human Factors: Human error is a frequent cause of engineering failures. A classic example is the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, where human confusion over a broken valve and a failure to communicate progress led to one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. Engineers must specifically consider human factors in their designs to prevent potential failures in complex systems where variable elements like people are involved.
  2. Design Flaws: These involve configurations or loadings that were not anticipated in the operating environment. The sinking of the Titanic is a prime illustration. The ship struck an iceberg, but the design flaw lay in how the engineers approached the analysis. They focused only on static analysis (assuming the ship was stationary and considering only the weight of the passengers, cargo, and wind forces). They failed to account for dynamic analysis, which considers external forces from the choppy sea and the unbalancing movement of a collision with an iceberg. Better hull configurations could have mitigated the devastating impact.
  3. Materials Failures: These failures are often caused by fatigue, creep, corrosion, or combinations thereof. While engineers typically assume a selected material is strong and stiff based on short-term properties, materials degrade over time, a crucial aspect that must be considered throughout the structure’s design life cycle. The Oklahoma City bombing exposed this vulnerability; a car bomb blew up columns, and while the “fail safe” was to transfer the load to a single point, the concrete was not strong enough to handle the entire load, exacerbating the damage. This incident tragically showed that terrorism, like natural extreme conditions, is now a factor in material choice and building construction planning.
  4. Extreme Conditions: These failures occur when engineering systems operate under environmental conditions that exceed the designed limits. Even if designers adhere to all regulations and standards, consequences beyond those considered can occur. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, built to be the longest suspension bridge of its time, collapsed because engineers did not fully account for the dangers of extreme winds, leading to twisting and partial collapse. This failure ultimately forced subsequent bridge designers, such as those working on the Brooklyn Bridge, to account for wind forces in their designs.
  5. Combinations of the Above: Often, major disasters are the result of multiple systemic failures. The BP oil spill involved a combination of design flaws, human error, extreme conditions, and material failures. These complex failures underscore that insufficient knowledge and uncertainty are often the biggest factors leading to catastrophic engineering design failures.

The Systematic Journey: Five Phases to Product Realization

Given the high cost of failure, the design process must be a systematic journey, relying on the team’s ability to communicate ideas through a series of steps that lead to project development. Although the steps may vary slightly across industries and products, a generic five-phase process underlies the development of new, innovative, and competitive products that meet business, societal, and environmental needs:

Phase 1: Establish Need

The journey begins here, dealing with identifying customers, stakeholders, and their needs. The needs are usually not initially identified by the designer. Needs can be driven by market demand (consumer demand for services/products), new technologies, business strategies, military regulations, government policies (federal, state, local), or sustainability concerns. A successful design need may arise from market research (examining demographics, aesthetics, socio-economic factors), analysis of existing designs (reverse engineering them for materials, function, and manufacturing processes), observation of end users (physical interaction, use/misuse, and psychological aspects), consideration of human factors (user interface, ergonomics, physical interface), and overall design integration (interdisciplinary incorporation of mechanical, electrical, and materials requirements). The formulation of the problem—identifying the societal need and defining it in measurable terms—is considered far more essential than the eventual solution, requiring the creative imagination that marks real advances in science.

Phase 2: Gathering Requirements

This phase is critical for defining the problem and project scope. It involves understanding who the stakeholders are and gathering all requirements to define the project objectives and constraints. The design may be limited by constraints such as available budget, time, materials, personnel, manufacturability, legal/ethical factors, and competition. Constant communication between clients, users, and designers is necessary to ensure the end user’s needs are truly understood. Typical design criteria that must be translated into engineering requirements include cost, reliability, quality, maintainability, human factors, safety, aesthetics, and environmental/societal impact. During this phase, information is gathered through surveys (using questionnaires to gather opinions on specific, well-defined subjects), observations (watching customers use existing products to identify refinements), and focus groups (sampling potential customers, best suited for developing original products or gathering views on improvements).

Phase 3: Conceptual Design

This is perhaps the most critical and important part of the entire design process. It involves generating a wide range of candidate concepts, analyzing them, and evaluating them against customer requirements. Techniques like brainstorming are commonly used to generate many alternative solutions. The major advantage of this early stage is that there is maximum flexibility for design changes with the lowest financial impact on overall cost. The goal is to identify one or two optimal concepts for further development.

Phase 4: Detail Design

Once the final concept is selected, this phase begins the refinement process. Detailed analyses are performed for specific aspects, including stress, deformation, heat transfer, failure, assembly, manufacturing feasibility (design for manufacturing), safety, and cost. The design team is responsible for finalizing all product details: geometry, dimensions, materials selection, assembly instructions, and creating all necessary manufacturing drawings. Various types of designs, such as configuration design, parametric design, robust design, and sustainability design, may be utilized here.

Phase 5: Release to Production

This final phase occurs after the detailed design and manufacturing plans are complete. It addresses assembly, quality control, and maintenance. It also includes planning for the end of the product’s designed life, covering issues like retirement, disposal, or recycling.

Design Paradigms: The Wall vs. The Team

The systematic organization of people and information leads to different methodologies, or design paradigms. Historically, two major approaches have dominated engineering design:

  1. Over-the-Wall Design (Conventional): This outdated approach segments the design effort into isolated groups. Information—such as customer needs—is sequentially “thrown over the wall” from one group to the next: customer → marketing → engineering design → production. The critical flaw is the separation and lack of interaction. This frequently results in a misunderstanding of needs, requiring additional time for clarification, causing inefficiencies, and ultimately leading to a product that is ineffective or fails its task.

  2. Concurrent Engineering (Parallel Design): This is the modern, preferred approach. It is defined by the integration of product and process design, involving all stakeholders—including marketing, materials specialists, manufacturing, and vendors—from the very beginning of the product development. This approach addresses ten key features built around integrating the product, the necessary tools/information, and the people. These features include focusing on the entire product life cycle, supporting design teams, recognizing the process’s importance, planning for information-centered tasks, generating multiple concepts, emphasizing communication, and developing product and manufacturing processes simultaneously.

The empirical evidence strongly favors concurrent engineering. Industry surveys (including data from companies like Toyota and Boeing) have demonstrated that the concurrent engineering approach can:

60%

70%+

350%+

This success stems directly from the principle that consistent communication—sharing the right information with the right people at the right time—is one of the most important indicators of product quality.

The Multidisciplinary Imperative

In today’s environment of increasing product complexity, the concurrent engineering paradigm has evolved into a necessity for a multidisciplinary approach. Multidisciplinary design and optimization, a new technology in engineering systems, exploits the synergy of mutually interacting phenomena by integrating people from various fields—mechanical engineering, business, arts, education, psychology, and electrical engineering—to understand the design problem and find robust solutions.

This integration ensures that product design addresses the three crucial aspects of consumer acceptance:

  • Engineering/Business: The product must be functional, factoring in production cost, safety, reliability, and manufacturability.
  • Design and Art: The product must be aesthetically desirable, appealing to ergonomics and product interface.
  • Customer Requirement/Business: The product must be usable, considering the cost of integration, ease of use, and material selection.

Through this multidisciplinary approach, products become useful, usable, and desirable. This concept is especially embraced in complex fields like the aerospace industry, where system design requires the integration of aerodynamics, structures, materials, propulsion, and controls. Design innovation itself can be achieved by integrating arts and engineering principles, recognizing that engineers frequently exhibit an artistic side, visible in the symmetry, balance, and rhythm of great engineering works, just as Leonardo da Vinci integrated art and engineering in his revolutionary concepts. The enduring monuments of the world, like the Pyramids of Egypt or the Taj Mahal of India, are cherished precisely because they represent a harmonious marriage of artistic/aesthetic appeal and sound engineering design.

The Designer’s Profile: Attributes for Success

The complexity of modern projects necessitates reliance on effective multidisciplinary design teams. These teams often require diverse talents, including professionals in business, psychology, and art, in addition to core engineering skills. The success of such a team depends heavily on individual members who are highly motivated, cooperative, and who regularly communicate ideas and decisions.

Effective team characteristics include:

  • Shared, clearly defined goals and objectives.
  • Understanding and commitment to customer expectations.
  • Effective decision-making based on facts and data.
  • Timely and effective communication to resolve conflicts.
  • Freedom to express ideas and feelings.
  • Continuous monitoring of performance for improvements.

A typical product development team requires specific roles, which may include a product design engineer (responsible for the primary design), a product manager (the liaison between the customer and the team), and a manufacturing engineer (providing input on facility capabilities and costs). Depending on the project, the team may also include a drafter (for CAD tools and drawings), a materials specialist, an artist (for creativity and innovative ideas), a quality control specialist, a technician (for testing), a detailer (finishing specifications), a machinist, a business manager (market strategy), and various vendors.

Finally, for any design engineer seeking marketability in the industry, certain core attributes are highly attractive to employers. These extend beyond pure technical expertise and include:

  • A firm grasp of engineering science fundamentals, including mathematics, physical sciences, life sciences, and information technology.
  • A clear understanding of the design process and manufacturing.
  • A basic understanding of the context in which engineering is practiced: economics, history, legal aspects, the environment, and social/customer needs.
  • Strong communication skills—written, verbal, and graphic.
  • High ethical standards.
  • The ability to think both critically and creatively, and to work cooperatively and independently.
  • Flexibility and the self-confidence to adapt to rapid and major change.
  • Curiosity and a lifelong desire to learn.
  • A profound understanding of the importance of team work.

Ultimately, the entire design journey—from the initial flash of an idea to the final release to production—is a systematic, iterative process built on multidisciplinary cooperation and disciplined application of principles. The objective of adopting this systematic methodology is not merely to follow steps, but to minimize the number of iterations required to produce a quality product that is durable, easily assembled, and meets all customer and performance criteria.

Analogy: If modern engineering were a symphony orchestra, the successful product—say, a jet engine or a medical device—would be the performance. Over-the-wall design (the conventional approach) is like having the string section record their part, pass it to the brass section to record theirs without ever listening to the strings, and so on. The final performance would be disjointed and inefficient, leading to predictable errors in tempo and harmony. Concurrent engineering (the modern approach) is gathering all musicians in one room from the start, sharing the score immediately, allowing the conductor (the project manager) to ensure continuous communication, and having the critics (the stakeholders) listen at critical junctures. The resulting synergy, though complex to manage, ensures a superior, faster, and more unified final product.