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. For decades, mechanical engineering undergraduate programs have culminated in a capstone design project. This final experience in the program has represented an opportunity for students to synthesize techniques and knowledge that they have acquired over their first three years of study. This feeling has generally been replaced with the realization that students need to practice design, just like analysis, to become competent, and that one experience at the end of a four-year program is not enough.
Students are capable of engaging in design, even on the first day of their freshmen year.
Furthermore, spreading the design experiences over four years may positively affect student performance and motivation in analysis classes. Capstone courses have evolved over the last decade to engage industrial partners more formally, to base project selection on a well-defined set of criteria, to acknowledge that teaching these courses is unlike a traditional lecture course, to develop offerings that are interdisciplinary, and to use the internet as one means of communications. We will discuss two complementary ways of introducing students to many of the design qualities listed in Table 1. The first of these ways is to have students study the artifacts and design processes of others, while the second has students doing design themselves. This course aims to help students gain confidence in their ability to work with, build up, and manipulate mechanisms and machines.