Engineering design education is generally focused on helping students develop into effective design practitioners. Design, in this general sense, is what engineers do most of their waking, professional hours. Design engages both the intellect and the imagination of the designer. Many of the qualities that an engineer needs in order to work as an effective mechanical designer are listed in Table 1. Each quality is comprised of competencies and attitudes.
Competencies are the skills necessary to carry out the mechanics of a particular quality.
A skilled design engineer knows how and when to draw upon the qualities in Table 1 to move the process forward. The quality of the student-created artifact is often less important than the student's understanding of the process by which the artifact was designed and created. Engineering educators believe that students should understand how to generate design specifications and how to proceed from design specifications to a final artifact by establishing objectives and criteria, generating alternatives, synthesizing, analyzing, constructing, testing, and evaluating. The qualities listed in Table 1 should be a major part of the process of design education. Larry Leifer of Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., has offered the notions that design education is a social activity, that learning to design requires becoming comfortable with ambiguity, and that all education is reeducation.