Design
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Learn the process of design and innovation in this free course. Understand the constraints and models involved in engineering design. Gain valuable skills in problem-solving and compromise for effective product development.
This free 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:
Recognise that functional artefacts 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 models 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.
