Talk:Engineering design process
"The" engineering design process?
- Copied from Talk:Engineering
I'm posting the question on this talk page because I'm not an engineer. There is a page that suggest by it's very title that there is only one engineering design process. That seems a little odd. The page is The engineering design process. Is this accurate? Oicumayberight 00:46, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
- There isn't really a single design process in the sense that every engineer follows exactly the same steps to a design. And there are certainly variations in the design process across discipline and industry. That said, in the abstract there is a common approach that might be referred to as the "engineering design process" (although a good argument can be made that it is more generally the "problem solving process" - for example, note the similarity with these process steps). A quick Googling shows several other websites that describe an engineering design process that is roughly the same as that described in the article you're concerned about, e.g here, here, or here. However, note that each process description, while describing essentially the same process, breaks down the steps of the "design process" in slightly different ways. My concerns with The engineering design process article are thus threefold:
- It seems under-referenced, and presents only a single way of dividing up the design process when in fact there isn't a single agreed way to define the process steps
- The tone of the article is not particularly encyclopedic, and it borders on a how-to guide at times
- It's not clear to me that "the engineering design process" warrants a separate encyclopedia article, since there isn't much that's engineering-specific about it - the steps presented in the article are fairly generic problem-solving process steps, or alternatively represent a generic design process.
- --Allan McInnes (talk) 04:53, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
- I agree that the reference article is not very useful as is, but could be marginally useful with some modifications: 1) strangely, there is not mention of the DESIGN of the product in the 10-step process - hard to engineer a product without doing that! 2) There should be a disclaimer at the start of the article that what follows is just one template or example, that that there is no one generic engineering design process.
- Better though to have the referenced article, if there is to be one, drastically rewritten. This topic is one of major importance to engineering organizations, and many texts and papers have been written about it. The reviewer who noticed this, even as a non-engineer, has done a service by noticing this disparity. But these comments should be transfered over to the referenced article to be effective.
- I'm also in general agreement with Allan McInnes. The article should reflect a diversity of current and historical practices, along with some representative future trends. Matt Whyndham 17:31, 25 January 2007 (UTC)