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3 books match the query 'Engineering Design'

cover of Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies

Discovering Design

Explorations in Design Studies

Edited by Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Discovering Design reflects the growing recognition that the design of the everyday world deserves attention not only as a professional practice but as a subject of social, cultural, and philosophic investigation. Victor Margolin, cofounder and an editor of the journal Design Issues, and Richard Buchanan, also an editor of the journal, bring together eleven essays by scholars in fields ranging from psychology, sociology, and political theory to technology studies, rhetoric, and philosophy. The essayists share the editors' concern, first made clear in Margolin's Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism, with the the development of design studies as a field of interdisciplinary research.

The contributors (Gianfranco Zaccai, Albert Borgmann, Richard Buchanan, Augusto Morello, Tufan Orel, Nigel Cross, Victor Margolin, Langdon Winner, Carl Mitcham, Tony Fry, and Ezio Manzini) focus on three broad themes that form a sequence of fundamental issues: how to shape design as a subject matter, how to distinguish the activity of designing in the complex world of action, and how to address the basic questions of value and responsibility that persistently arise in the discussion and practice of design. The editors' introduction provides a useful overview of these questions and offers a multidisciplinary framework for design studies. The essays discuss such topics as the relation of aesthetics to technology, the place of design in social action, the role of the consumer in design decisions, and the need for ethical practice in contemporary design. Manzini's concluding essay shows how the issue of ethics should connect responsible behavior to decisions made every day in the manufacture of objects.
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cover of Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge

Hitting the Brakes

Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge

Ann Johnson

Duke University Press, 2009

In Hitting the Brakes, Ann Johnson illuminates the complex social, historical, and cultural dynamics of engineering design, in which knowledge communities come together to produce new products and knowledge. Using the development of antilock braking systems for passenger cars as a case study, Johnson shows that the path to invention is neither linear nor top-down, but highly complicated and unpredictable. Individuals, corporations, university research centers, and government organizations informally coalesce around a design problem that is continually refined and redefined as paths of development are proposed and discarded, participants come and go, and information circulates within the knowledge community. Detours, dead ends, and failures feed back into the developmental process, so that the end design represents the convergence of multiple, diverse streams of knowledge.

The development of antilock braking systems (ABS) provides an ideal case study for examining the process of engineering design because it presented an array of common difficulties faced by engineers in research and development. ABS did not develop predictably. Research and development took place in both the public and private sectors and involved individuals working in different disciplines, languages, institutions, and corporations. Johnson traces ABS development from its first patents in the 1930s to the successful 1978 market introduction of integrated ABS by Daimler and Bosch. She examines how a knowledge community first formed around understanding the phenomenon of skidding, before it turned its attention to building instruments to measure, model, and prevent cars’ wheels from locking up. While corporations’ accounts of ABS development often present a simple linear story, Hitting the Brakes describes the full social and cognitive complexity and context of engineering design.

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cover of Introduction to Engineering Design: A Conceptual Overview

Introduction to Engineering Design

A Conceptual Overview

Kenneth Alfano

Michigan Publishing Services, 2025

Introduction to Engineering Design: A Conceptual Overview provides a basic overview of the process of engineering design – the "heart" of engineering – in a broadly accessible manner that assumes no specialized knowledge. The focus is on breadth over depth, for a contextual framework that can in turn facilitate more detailed or focused learning later on. Relevant for a wide range of engineering disciplines, it outlines core design process fundamentals while also introducing various related points along the way.
 
Engineering design courses are often project-oriented, and rightly so, given that the process is best understood through some amount of experience. But a conceptual foundation is likewise critical for this subject. It helps enable experiential learning to relate the broad context of design process elements to the specific context of a given project. Further, engineering students tend to start out more acquainted with thinking about math and science subjects, where there is often one way – or at least a clear best way – to a “right” answer. The design process, by marked contrast, is largely qualitative and open-ended. Relatedly, it can (perhaps ironically) aid early learners to point out how varied and inconsistent the usage can be for some terminology – so the book does so at times, to help preempt confusion down the road.
 
In addition to being a text for an introductory college course, the book can also serve as a supplemental or reference text for later courses or on the job, or simply a general overview for those curious about the subject.
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