Activity 4: Overview
In the previous activity, you studied the engineering design process, and saw that designers have to find creative solutions to various design problems.
Due to the complexity of modern engineering products, a single individual working alone is unable to find solutions to the kind of problems faced in design. Furthermore, modern engineering products comprise systems from different engineering domains such as mechanical engineering, electronics, computing and human factors engineering. Therefore, designers in organisations work in teams to complement each other’s skills, diversify their approach to the problem and take advantage of the benefits of division of labour.
In addition to hard engineering skills, such as the ability to perform precise calculations, a good designer must also possess many soft skills that can be even more important to the success of their career than hard skills. Examples of soft skills that a designer must have include:
- the ability to express and present ideas clearly and succinctly both in writing and orally
- the ability to work as part of a team and contribute to the team’s success
- the ability to ensure that the solution they are designing is the right one.
In this activity you will look at some of these soft skills. You will start by looking at the kinds of communication skills that every designer must have, and how to plan for a talk, presentation or meeting. You will then consider team work and examine the features of good teams that can deliver success. You will examine a particular type of creative team effort called brainstorming in which members of the team help each other find numerous innovative solutions to a problem.
Finally, you will look at problem abstraction, which is one of the most important techniques that designers should apply whenever they are faced with a new task.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this activity, you will be able to:
- Describe at least three soft skills required in engineering design
- Practice one essential soft skill: abstraction.
Fundamental Skills in Engineering Design
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