Unit 4: Introduction to

Engineering Design

Learning Module for CMP101

(Computer Engineering as a Discipline)

By
Engr. Roman M. Richard, MEng

Copyright © 2020, Columban College, Inc.

All rights Reserved

(No part of this module may be reproduced or copied without the permission from the author.)

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 UNIT 4
INTRODUCTION TO ENGINEERING DESIGN

CONTENTS
4.0. Learning Objectives
4.1. Basic Steps in Product Design
4.2. Design Considerations for Sustainability
4.3. Introduction to Significant Design Factors
4.3.1. Economic Consideration
4.3.2. Material Selection
4.3.3. Teamwork
4.3.4. Project Scheduling
4.3.5. Engineering Standards and Codes
4.5. References for Further Reading

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4.0. Learning Objectives

After this unit, the student must be able to:

4.1. Explain the basic steps taken in designing a product and solving a problem.
4.2. Explain sustainability and its significance in engineering design.
4.3. Explain the role of engineering economics, material design, teamwork, project
scheduling, and engineering codes and standards in engineering design.

4.1. Basic Steps in Product Design

For this unit, please refer to the reference book (Engineering Fundamentals, SI: An
Introduction to Engineering) and check chapter 3 p. 53-60 for a detailed explanation of each of
the steps listed below.

Step 1: Recognizing the Need for a Product or a Service

“Necessity is the mother of invention” is an old saying that holds true for
any product design. This necessity can be identified when a person or people bring up
complaints about a service, or express want for a non-existing thing or a missing feature
to something existing. Identified by yourself, your company, your client, or other
concerned individuals.

Step 2: Problem Definition and Understanding

The most important step in any design process. The problem cannot be
solved if it is not understood properly and if we do not a concrete grasp on the definition
or scope. This answers important considerations like cost, scheduling, deadlines, among
others. This overarching problem can then be divided into smaller problems that are
divided among different members of the project. Only move on once you have a
masterful understanding of the problem.

Step 3: Research and Preparation

Research is not exclusive to reading books or journals related to your
topics, but finding information related to your problem and how to solve it. Additionally,
we must consider that there may be sub-problems that have been invented that we could
use or just modify for our own product. Collaborations are sometimes the best way to
approach solutions to problems. There isn’t always the need to “reinvent the wheel.”

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Step 4:Conceptualization
Be creative and approach your problem with an imaginative idea. Do not
consider different constraints yet, but rather take not of the different innovative concepts
you have. Afterwards, we can decide if these ideas are feasible in different aspects.
Which of them are technically and economically feasible and realistic? Then you may
evaluate identified concepts (as alternatives) and decide which one is the best way to go
using an evaluation table.

Design I Design II
Design Criterion I R R×I R R×I
Positive
Originality
Practicability
Manufacturability
Reliability
Performance
Durability
Appearance
Profitability
Other

Negative
Production cost
Operation cost
Maintenance cost
Time to complete the project
Environmental impact
Other

Net Score
Table 4.1. Evaluating Alternative Concepts

We begin by assigning a value to the level of importance (I) on the scale of 1 – 5, with 1
being least important and 5 being most important. Next, rate (R) each concept by how it
meets the design criterion as 3 (high), 2 (medium), or 1 (low). Remember that table 4.1.

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is only an example and not a template for the values assigned or the different criteria.
Table 4.2. shows the comparison of two alternative designs based on table 4.1.

Design I Design II
Design Criterion I R R×I R R×I
Positive
Originality 4 2 8 3 12
Practicability 5 3 15 2 10
Manufacturability 5 3 15 2 10
Reliability 5 3 15 3 15
Performance 5 3 15 2 10
Durability 4 2 8 2 8
Appearance 4 2 8 3 12
Profitability 5 3 15 2 10
Other
99 87
Negative
Production cost 5 2 10 3 15
Operation cost 4 2 8 2 8
Maintenance cost 3 2 6 3 9
Time to complete the project 5 3 15 3 15
Environmental impact 5 2 10 3 15
Other
49 62
Net Score 50 25
Table 4.2. Comparison of Two Alternative Designs

Step 5:Synthesis
Engineers are characterized for having a good grasp on fundamentals of
science and mathematics and being able to incorporate these things in the design process.
The engineer must have the ability to use computer tools, and mathematics to implement
conceptual designs therefore synthesizing different facets of knowledge to implement the
product design.

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 Step 6:Evaluation
In this phase, we simply include more details in our analysis of the
problem. We need to make sure that all calculations are done correctly. When there are
uncertainties, use experimental investigation. At this stage, we must be able to identify
which of the alternatives is the best and all necessary and important details must be
specific and expounded.

Step 7:Optimization
Using functional design and optimal design, we can optimize so far by
either minimizing or maximizing. Functional design goes hand in hand with the identified
design requirements. Optimizing the design now takes into consideration certain criterion
and how we can minimize or maximize aspects without compromising other important
ones.

Step 8:Presentation
The last and arguably the most important aspect once all design
requirements have been finished, is the ability of the engineer to communicate all the
design concepts to the client. This often comes in a visual/oral presentation but may also
be a written report.

Check Your Progress 1

Create a brief description of each engineering design step in order. Additionally, create
three solution concepts revolving around a problem of your own choice. Use the template in
table 4.1 to rate and evaluate your concepts to show which one is the best solution to your chosen
problem.

4.2. Design Considerations for Sustainability

First, we must define sustainability. There are different definitions of it but we will
reference Paul Hawken’s definition (The Ecology of Commerce, 1993, p.139) which states:
“An economic state where the demands placed upon the environment by people and
commerce can be met without reducing the capacity of the environment to provide for
future generations.”

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So, when we create our products or in the process of designing such products, we must be wary
of how we use resources so that we would not compromise the environment. Additionally, we
design with consideration to economic principles and social and ecological sustainability. The
American Council of Engineering Companies, 2005 offer five issues to be understood to assume
new responsibilities for sustainability. These are:

1. The world’s current economic development is not sustainable—the world population

already uses approximately 20% more of the world’s resources than the planet can
sustain. (UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report, 2005.
2. The effects of outpacing the earth’s carrying capacity have now reached crisis
proportions—spiking energy costs, extreme weather events causing huge losses, and the
prospect of rising sea levels threatening coastal cities. Global population increase
outstrips the capacity of institutions to address it.
3. An enormous amount of work will be required if the world is to shift to sustainable
development—a complete overhaul of the world’s processes, systems, and infrastructure
will be needed.
4. The engineering community should be leading the way toward sustainable development
but has not yet assumed that responsibility. Civil engineers have few incentives to
change. Most civil engineers deliver conventional engineering designs that meet building
codes and protect the status quo.
5. People outside the engineering community are capitalizing on this new opportunity—
accounting firms and architects are examples cited by Wallace. The architects bring their
practices into conformity with the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy
and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System.

Key sustainability concepts, methods, and tools. These terms are self-explanatory, think about
them and later describe them in your own words.

Key sustainability concepts – understanding the earth’s finite resources and

environmental issues; socioeconomic issues related to sustainability; ethical aspects of
sustainability; sustainable development.
Key sustainability methods – lifecycle-based analysis; resource and waste management
(material, energy); environmental impact analysis.
Key sustainability tools – lifecycle assessment; environmental assessment; use of
sustain development indicators.

4.2.1. Approaches to Sustainable Design

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Minimize Sources of Environmental Impacts
- Material Selection
- Manufacturing Process
- Energy Use
Design for Life Cycle of a Product, Not just the Product
- Implement guidelines that reduce impact through the life cycle of the product
Industrial Ecology
- Circulating and Using Materials
- Reducing Material Use
- Protecting Living Organisms
- Minimizing the Use of Energy

4.2.2. The Lifecycle Perspective

Life cycle assessment is a sophisticated way of examining the total environmental impact
of a product through every step of its life - from obtaining raw materials all the way through
making it in a factory, selling it in a store, using it in the home, and disposing of it. For computer
engineers, we will look at life cycles of both hardware (fig. 4.1.) and software (fig.4.2. - 4.5.)

Manufacture
Redesign
Retailer
Re-use / Sector
Recycling Repair
User

Figure 4.1. Hardware Lifecycle

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 Figure 4.2. Waterfall Model

The waterfall model is one of the oldest and most “basic” lifecycle development models
for software. It is very strict and rigid, requiring the previous step be completed before moving
on to the next step of the model. It is useful for short-term projects with a duration of around 2
months wherein all scopes and problems are well defined.

Figure 4.3. Iterative Model

The iterative software development model is as literal as the name suggests. We move
from one iteration to the next while improving/changing code as deemed necessary through the
verification phase. It is good for projects wherein throughout the duration there are expected
changes to the scope or problems defined. It is more costly with resources.

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 Figure 4.4. Spiral Model

Unlike the other models, the Spiral Model considers risk and starts with the identification
of objectives and constraints. Followed by the prototyping of the software, wherein we do risk
analysis. The n+1 iteration is planned at the end of the n iteration.

Figure 4.4. V-Model

Compared to the waterfall model, which was described earlier as strict and rigid, where
making a mistake on one step means we could not go back to fix it. The V-model

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(Verification/Validation Model) allows us to verify or validate every phase with set requirements
defined. It is also known as an evolved waterfall model.

Figure 4.5. Big Bang Model

The model that requires the least amount of planning, but it takes a lot of resources and
could result in the best software product.

Check Your Progress 2

1. Explain the following:

a. The five issues regarding our responsibility for sustainability.
b. The key sustainability concepts, methods, and tools.
c. The different approaches to a sustainable design.

2. Identify a significant difference between the common elements of the software lifecycle model
compared to the hardware lifecycle model. Explain your choice(s).

4.3. Introductions to Significant Design Factors

In this section, we will look at different significant design factors for engineers. However,
as you gradually study more years into your degree, you will learn these design factors in more
detail. Some of the significant design factors are:
1. Economic
2. Material Selection
3. Teamwork
4. Project Scheduling
5. Engineering Standards and Codes

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4.3.1. Economic Consideration
When you create a product, you want these products to be at an affordable price so that
consumers can purchase your product. If your design does not have any economic
considerations, you may arrive at a design wherein parts or the whole uses expensive
components.

4.3.2. Material Selection

Even computer engineers, who design products must make appropriate selections of
materials they will use in the prototype or final product they are creating. A summary of
important material properties is listed below.
1. Electrical Resistivity
2. Density
3. Modulus of Elasticity (Young’s Modulus)
4. Modulus of Rigidity (Shear Modulus)
5. Tensile Strength
6. Compression Strength
7. Modulus of Resilience
8. Modulus of Toughness
9. Strength-to-Weight Ratio
10. Thermal Expansion
11. Thermal Conductivity
12. Heat Capacity
13. Viscosity
14. Vapor Pressure
15. Bulk Modulus of Compressibility

4.3.3. Teamwork
It is important to work with a team wherein each individual member know their own
strengths and weaknesses, as well as an understanding of their role in the group. Member of the
team (or design team) must complement each other and work well with one another. Many
companies want to look for individuals who aren’t just smart but also have the ability to work
well with other teams.

Common Traits of Good Terms

Successful teams have the following common traits:

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 1. The project that is assigned to a team must have clear and realistic goals. These goals
must be understood and accepted by all members of the team.
2. The team should be made up of individuals with complementary expertise, problem
solving skills, background, and talent.
3. The team must have a good leader.
4. The team leadership and the environment in which discussions take place should promote
openness, respect, and honesty.
5. Team needs and goals should come before individual needs and goals.

According to Dr. R. Meredith Belbin, in his book Management Teams: Why They Succeed or
Fail, he was able to identify different roles that team members would typically fill in a successful
team.
a) The organizer is an experienced and confident member who can clarify goals and further
decision making. This person is trusted by the group and acts as the coordinator for the
whole project.
b) The creator is the imaginative member who thinks of innovative solutions to problems,
and the team can work on making these creative solutions into reality.
c) The gatherer is not only hardworking, but someone is also sociable. Good at obtaining
things, looking for possibilities, and developing contacts.
d) The motivator is the voice of reason for the team. Someone who is also energetic,
confident, and outgoing. Able to steer the team into the right direction and make
objective decisions.
e) The evaluator is someone who has a good grasp on the scope of the project. Intelligent
and able to objectively judge the outcomes.
f) The team worker is the person who tries to get the whole team to come together.
Dislikes friction and conflict among members of the team.
g) The solver can turn concepts into practical solutions. Additionally, this is someone
reliable and decisive.
h) The finisher is someone who will finish their assigned task as scheduled. A detail-
oriented person, worrisome about lagging work and the team’s progress.
Other factors that may impact the team’s performance include:
- Company organization;
- Delegation of projects;
- Resources available to the team; and
- Workplace culture: whether honesty, respect, and openness are traits that are valued and
promoted.

4.3.4. Project Scheduling

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 Time management is always important. Since tasks pile up, engineers must be able to
manage the time that they allocate to the right tasks which is imperative to finishing the project
at the set schedule and within the allocated budget. A good schedule will not only make use of
all personnel, time, and resources properly but will also eliminate any possible task and
assignment redundancies.

Figure 4.6. Queue Management System Sample Gantt Chart

4.3.5. Engineering Standards and Codes

Standards and codes exist to ensure that work and deliverables do not become subpar.
Without following standards and codes, it is possible for a majority of delivered output to not be
safe for use by clients. These important rules exist everywhere and everyday in our lives,
sometimes they go unnoticed by us. Our devices, the vehicles we ride, and even the clothes we
wear and food we eat all follow strict standards before we can have them. See

Men’s Shirts
EU 36 37 38 39 41 42 43
US 14 14 ½ 15 15 ½ 16 16 ½ 17
Men’s Shoes
EU 38 39 41 42 43 44 45 46
NA 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Table 4.3. Shoe and Shirt Size Standards for US and EU

In the Philippines, we have different laws and agencies that enforce these standards:
 Bureau of Philippine Standards which publishes the Philippine Nation Standards
(PNS);
 Philippine Technological Council which recognizes engineering programs;

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  Occupational Safety and Health Standards as implemented by the Department of
Labor and Employment (DOLE) for a safe workplace;
 Philippine Electrical Code (PEC) which establishes basic materials quality and
electrical works standards for the safe use of light, heat, power, communications,
signaling, and for other purposes;

Aside from national standards, there are also standards followed internationally by different
agencies, including but not limited to:
 Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineering (IEEE) which has a portfolio of
nearly 1,3000 standards and projects under development, and a leading developer of
industry standards in a wide range of technologies that promote the functionality,
capabilities, and interoperability of products and services (ieee.org).
 International Organization for Standardization (ISO) which is an independent, non-
governmental, international organization that develops standards to ensure the quality,
safety, and efficiency or products, services, and systems (meedmetals.com).
 International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) develops standards for all electrical,
electronic, and related technologies.

Check Your Progress 3

1. Explain what is meant by a design team and describe the common traits of these good design
teams.
2. Can conflict happen in good teams? Why or why not? How do good teams manage conflict?
3. Provide one method that engineering managers use to ensure that schedules are met, and
deliverables are achieved on time.
4. Explain the importance of at least 4 standards that you’ve observed in your everyday life.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT

Case Study # 1: A Breach in Security (Bartlett, 2015)

Data-Time Inc. is a company which manages databases for a large city in Colorado.
Included in these databases is information collected from the city’s homeless shelters and free
clinics. Specifically, the databases contain personal information of the users of these services
over the past 10 years; this includes people’s Social Security numbers and health records. This
data is highly secure and only accessible to the employees of Data-Time Inc. Employees are

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given a laptop when they are hired which allows them to access the database remotely.
Unfortunately, one of these laptops is stolen and the security of the database is compromised. A
majority of the people whose information was compromised are homeless; therefore there is no
easy way to contact them in order to alert them of the security breach.
Discussion Question: How should Data-Time Inc. manage this breach in security?

Case Study # 2: An AI Ethics Case Study (Vincent, 2020)

In February 2019, the San Francisco-based Open AI group made a decision that sent
reverberations through the AI and open source communities worldwide. First, it announced
“GPT-2,” a major improvement in language models which, according to its creators, generates
“coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling
benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question
answering, and summarization—all without task-specific training.” Open AI then added this:
Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or
abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along
with sampling code. We are not releasing the dataset, training code, or GPT-2 model
weights.
Open-AI also released a technical paper. GPT-2 is trained as a large-scale unsupervised
language model on 40 GBs of content scraped from the Internet with a Reddit karma score of
over 3. Given the “fake news” era, much discussion in the community followed on the potential
harms to society vs. the benefits to researchers. Open AI then did a staged release. In May 2019,
it released an expanded dataset with a more detailed model. Finally, in November, it released the
full GPT-2, arguing this:
We’ve seen no strong evidence of misuse so far. While we’ve seen some discussion
around GPT-2’s potential to augment high-volume/low-yield operations like spam and
phishing, we haven’t seen evidence of writing code, documentation, or instances of
misuse. We think synthetic text generators have a higher chance of being misused if their
outputs become more reliable and coherent. We acknowledge that we cannot be aware of
all threats, and that motivated actors can replicate language models without model
release.

Discussion Questions:
1. For the full release of GPT-2, who are the stakeholders involved? Who are the people
and/or organizations directly or indirectly impacted by GPT-2’s release? Who are
benefited? What types of harms might arise?
2. What issues and concerns come into focus in this case from applying each of the five
ethical lenses?
a. Rights

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 b. Fairness/Justice
c. Utilitarianism
d. Common good
e. Virtues
3. Given your discussion, how would you assess the ethics of Open AI’s decision in
November to release GPT-2 in full?

Case Study References:

1. Model: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/model_card.md
2. Github: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2
3. Nov 2019 release: https://openai.com/blog/gpt-2-1-5b-release/
4. Training data context: To get a sense of the data that went into GPT-2, Open AI
published a list of the top 1,000 domains present in WebText and their frequency. “The
top 15 domains by volume in WebText are: Google, Archive, Blogspot, GitHub,
NYTimes, Wordpress, Washington Post, Wikia, BBC, The Guardian, eBay, Pastebin,
CNN, Yahoo!, and the Huffington Post.” –Open AI.

4.4. References / Further Reading

1. Moaveni, S. Engineering Fundamentals, SI (pp. 50 - 99). Cengage Learning.

2. Software Development Life Cycle - Tutorialspoint. Tutorialspoint.com. (2020). Retrieved
from
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/software_engineering/software_development_life_cycle.htm.

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