This grant funds a study by the National Academy of Sciences that will examine engineering design practice and education. In particular, it will compare and critique existing methods of design such as Quality Function Deployment, the Pugh matrix method, the Analytical Hierarchy Process and Axiomatic Design with the emerging decision sciences based Decision-Based Design methods. A panel of experts will be convened to consider these issues and make recommendations for engineering design practice and education. The panel of experts will include people whose expertise spans engineering design and support disciplines such as mathematics, probability theory, operations research, economics and the decision sciences. This study is expected to provide results that will help guide both practicing engineers and engineering educators. For practicing design engineers, it will provide a critique of design methods and raise issues of relevance and rigor, and point to possible pitfalls in some of the methods. For engineering design educators, it will provide guidelines for curriculum development, particularly in the area of engineering design.
