Course summary

Congratulations on getting to the end of the course! We hope you have enjoyed building your knowledge and understanding of some of the core principles of engineering design.

What have you learnt?

In Week 1, you learnt that ‘engineering design’ means applying mathematical and scientific skills combined with soft skills such as teamwork and creative thinking to produce products that we use every day.

The five fields of engineering

You identified five fields of engineering: mechanical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, software engineering, civil engineering and architectural engineering.

You saw that these fields can overlap, such as mechatronics (a combination of mechanical and electronic engineering).

The five types of engineering

You learnt that, depending on the level of innovation required, it is possible to identify 5 types of engineering design: Innovative design, routine design, adaptive design, continuous or evolutionary design and parametric design

The product life cycle

You explored the product life cycle and identified the five stages: Design, manufacture, marketing, usage and disposal.

The design phase

You focussed next on the design phase of the product lifecycle, which is broken into four phases: the problem formulation stage, the conceptual design stage, the embodiment design stage and the detail design stage.

The conceptual stage of the design phase

Next, you drilled down into the second stage of the design phase, the conceptual stage. This is the most creative and dynamic phase. You learnt that there are four stages to the conceptual phase of design:

• identify the functions of a product, which informs the development of a function structure
• the creative element steps up in the next stage – the solutions stage
• these solutions are combined into concepts, using a solutions matrix
• the concepts are evaluated and scored using the Pugh matrix.

Soft skills

In the second week of the course, you learnt about some of the soft skills required to be an engineering designer, not least because most engineering designers work in teams. We focussed here on the skill of problem abstraction, which enables designers to interrogate whether they are focussing on the right problem to solve.

Conceptual design and the solar tracker

You ended Week 2 with a series of exercises and discussion around a case study (designing a solar tracker). This exercise has hopefully enable you to consolidate what you learned about the conceptual phase of engineering design.

How has this course supported you? 

Now you have almost completed the course, it’s a good time to consider how your knowledge, confidence and aspirations have changed. Please answer this short end-of-course survey. It includes some prompts to help your reflection and will help us improve and evidence the impact of the course. 

Note: this optional survey does not affect your completion of the course. Further detail on how we (University of Leeds) use survey responses is included at the start of the survey and in this Privacy Notice. 

The test

Now it’s time to take the test – 10 questions to consolidate and test your understanding of the course as a whole. The pass mark of 70% and you can take the test as many times as you like to achieve your certificate. Good luck!