Although it is not frequently recognized, engineering design has been at the core of the American being throughout the history of the nation. The continual urge to improve things in a material sense, and along with it the easy acceptance of change, set the scene for a steady flow of innovative ideas and enterprising manufacture.

The concept of interchangeable parts and the idea of building the tolerance into the machine to make more effective use of a continually changing workforce are examples of early thinking that revolutionized design and manufacture at the time.

Visit the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Ford Museum in Detroit, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco with an eye to design and one is overwhelmed with the ingenuity, tenacity, and foresight of American engineers in years gone by. The results have not always been as expected and the long-term benefits to society are sometimes questioned, but the pattern of innovation continues and, with recent rapid developments in materials and computer technology, the outcome has been startling.

History also reminds us that the ingenious product is not necessarily a safe product, a quality product or an economic product, let alone a useful one. Why did that mighty boiler explode? Will the fancy fastener hold? How can the new product be improved? In 1880, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers was created, with Dr. Robert Henry Thurston as its enthusiastic president, to provide a forum for discussing engineering issues, pooling resources, and building a collective body of knowledge to assist in future technological developments. Living consensus documents, such as the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code, were later initiated to address critical safety issues and, as more and more areas of interest were drawn in, the organization developed to what today is a complex web of interactive boards, technical groups, and committees.

In 1945, it was recognized that the area of engineering design itself warranted more specific attention, and the Machine Design Division was established within ASME. This became the Design Engineering Division in 1966 and since then it has grown to become one of the largest and liveliest technical divisions within the organization. More than 12,000 ASME members have design as their primary interest.

While divisions such as the Pressure Vessel and Piping Division are focused on specific technical issues, and in producing practical standards and codes that are accepted throughout the world, the Design Division is more of a broad-based forum for exploring ideas, sharing experiences, and developing new approaches to handling problems in design. A hundred years ago, the main issues in engineering design revolved around making things work. Now things are more complicated. The design engineer and the design educator also must grapple with issues on environmental, legal, manufacturing, marketing, maintenance, life cycle, intellectual property, cultural, and global considerations, as well as a host of influencing factors once considered far outside the realm of engineers.

To cover such a wide range of issues, the Design Engineering Division currently has 10 technical committees, each contributing expertise in overlapping areas of interest. These include improving the design process itself; developing new tools for design; modeling fluid flows; analyzing stress, vibration, and sound; designing mechanisms, power transmissions, and gearing; fastening and joining of materials; integrating design and manufacture; inproving product reliability; and preventing failures.

The division addresses design education, professional registration, continuing education, safety in design, and the management of design. It is steadily taking on a more international role by organizing, co-sponsoring, and participating in conferences and other events that draw together professional engineers, design educators, and design researchers from all over the world. It also provides opportunities for publishing technical papers in the three journals associated with the division.

With such a pool of resources on the practice of engineering design, the teaching of engineering design, and research on engineering design in a widely recognized engineering organization, it might be expected that designers at work in industry would gravitate to the Design Engineering Division of ASME to help them with improving their products and for synergistic interaction with design educators and researchers in the field.

However, the active core of the division is surprisingly small and, within the existing framework of technical committees, there is enormous potential for design engineers in industry to expand their horizons and develop their professional standing by participating in the activities of the division.

It is sometimes difficult for a company, particularly a small one, to see what value there is in ASME membership for its design engineers, let alone participation in expensive and time-consuming conferences. Often, these are seen as the province of academics who must produce a steady stream of "peer-reviewed" papers in order to survive. From an academic's point of view, the emphasis on published papers is indeed a fact of life and conferences have become an integral part of the publication process with review criteria tailored to the academic paper. The unfortunate outcome of all this is that the industrial company fails to make use of a valuable resource and the academic world fails to stay in tune with its primary customers.

Our next challenge for the future will be to reestablish and develop working cross-connections for real communication between design research in academia and design practice in industry. I hope that this first design supplement to Mechanical Engineering will help to focus your attention on the importance of design in the world today and the need for us all to work together, so as to fully realize the benefits of developments in the field of engineering design.

Crispin Hales, Chair, Design Engineering Division, 1999-2000


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