Engineering design research-a pragmatic approach

It is important to improve the safety, reliability, performance and competitiveness of all the products and technical systems which surround us. Since engineering design teams fundamentally influence these factors, it is important to ensure that the design processes they use are in line with `best practice´. The aim of engineering design research is to build up a coherent body of knowledge which defines `best practice´ for a particular context. The author shows that a pragmatic approach to planning an integrated engineering design research programme might be to start with some tentative statements on what is known about design in general, and from these to derive some questions to be answered about engineering design and engineering design research