We are all convinced that an outstanding engineering design cannot be done without creativity and innovation. However, this is not the whole story. Engineering design aims to make the world a better place for people to live, so it cannot be only creative and innovative, but also, economically applicable to common use.
Engineering design does not like arts design. The machines engineers designed should help to make people’s life more convenient, or at least can be used by people. There is a program on Discovery Channel called Doing Da Vinci. Four engineers are involved in the program, whose duty is bringing the machines Da Vinci designed hundreds years ago back to life. They did an excellent job, but from another angle, we realise that Da Vinci’s creative, beautiful and even artistic designs are not useful at all. Four hundred years after Da Vinci, a great inventor, Edison’s designs changed the world much. How come the Edison’s designs were so popular, while Da Vinci’s complex design stopped on the draft paper? The secret is the practicability of designs, which is a basic requirement for designs become products.
However, there is another test before designs become popular products, which is about the survival ability in world market. This requirement limits the cost of engineering designs. In the economic world, we know in order to make a trade successful, the marginal benefit should overtake the marginal cost of the product. As engineering designs will become market products at last, engineers should follow the rules of economic world, trying to make the cost of designs as low as possible and the value as high as possible. So when engineers are thinking creatively, it is necessary for them to design products in a more economical way.
In the modern world, people’s involvement in the scope of market calls for engineers thinking beyond creativity and innovation. If an engineer wants his or her design to be popular, he needs to make it a product in the market. Moreover, to make the design a popular product, the engineer should consider how to make a useful design with the lowest cost in the beginning. Now, engineering design is beyond creativity and innovation.
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Yes, I agree with you.What is dream? How can it influence our life? We can hardly imagine the old days when no refrigerators and no planes were available. The life at that time was not so convenient and enjoyable. Therefore, people’s need made them to dream. They dreamed for better lifestyle with more useful and wonderful things. People wanted faster transportations, they designed to fly, so the plane was invented. It is the same as today. Nowadays, though our world is highly developed, it is still full of problems. What drives us? What is the purpose of life? It is that we all want to make this place a better place to live in.
ReplyDeleteHow to start a dream? We have dreams because we are not happy with the things around us at the moment. If we do not accept things so easily and be constantly irritated, we will have a lot of dreams. There are always some space for things to improve. For example, when we eat noodles, we always find that the noodles is too hot to be put into our mouths. Someone invents a super chopsticks that has a fan on it. The fan can make the noodles cool enough to eat. Maybe you are too shy to use the new things because the others will laugh at you. While, after all the people find the thing is useful and powerful, they all tend to use it. Then, the one who don’t use it will be laughed at.