Taking ideas out for a drive

“Students will be able to take their ideas out for a drive.”

That, says Clifton Johnston, is the purpose of the new Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) chair in Dalhousie’s Faculty of Engineering. The Chair in Design Engineering (CDE) will help train students to apply the engineering principles they learn to solve real-world problems that lack clear and defined solutions.

Dr. Johnston, an industrial engineering professor, and Peter Gregson, professor in electrical and computer engineering and founder and previous director of the Faculty of Engineering’s iDLab are co-recipients of the $1 million NSERC-CDE. It’s meant to support innovative design education, the teaching of design throughout the faculty and establish collaboration within the university and other institutions across Canada. This is especially important, as the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board has implemented new requirements on design that must be met in accredited programs.

Level of innovation dropped

“NSERC was a key player in increasing the emphasis on design in engineering,” says Dr. Gregson, who was also one of the first recipients of this NSERC-CDE program in 2001.
 
“Tom Brzustowski (NSERC President from 1995-2005) recognized that the level of innovation had dropped. The program was launched to increase the teaching of design and innovation to better meet the needs of industry and society in Canada.”

While this may seem obvious, since the 1950s, engineering education became increasingly analytical – more focused on one right answer. As a result, there was less emphasis on exploration and experimentation.

“It’s tough to assess good design,” says Dr. Johnston. “Design research is a lot of testing and prototyping and there isn’t always one clear answer.”

One challenge is that students haven’t been allowed to fail during their education and as a result, they’ve been programmed to find the right answer, right away. Both professors hope this chair will help address this in a positive way.

“We want to help [the faculty] teach students that you have to succeed at the end, not necessarily at the first step,” says Dr. Gregson. “That’s a reality in engineering, and we want that, it helps us learn and adapt. The information from failures helps you succeed.”

As Thomas Edison once said - “I haven't failed. I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.”

The goal of the chair is to promote innovation through design in the classroom and to help commercialize innovation. As such, the chair serves as a link with industry to bring projects to the classroom.

“The chair is focused on developing a design continuum at the core of engineering education,” says Dr. Johnston. “We’ll get them to use their skills by giving them real-world problems from day one. This merging of analytical and practical design skills will create better engineers.”

With more hands-on, real-world projects students will have more freedom to experiment with their own ideas—and there won’t be any answers in the back of the book. On the other hand, industry will have access to ideas and also be able to scout for talent—a “win-win” says Dr. Gregson.

“The students will put their own ideas on the table, build their own prototypes, test their own systems,” he says. “If they follow good engineering design process and use good engineering justifications, they can do whatever they want,” adds Dr. Johnston.

So what is good design? According to both men, it’s in the eye of the end user.

“Innovation happens when there is a need,” says Dr. Gregson. “Good design requires you to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Students will have to empathize with that person.”

Often times that design is the simplest solution, however, that is rarely the easiest to get to. “To understand a problem, you have to get to where you remove a piece and performance improves.  To make a great product you need to get to where if you take one more piece out, the design won’t work,” explains Dr. Gregson. “That is why prototyping and learning from initial failures is so critical.”

Partnerships the chair hopes to foster extend beyond industry, to NGOs, not-for-profit organizations and charitable groups.

Address real-world problems

“Today’s students are more socially responsible and we should encourage this by helping [these organizations] with their problems,” says Dr. Gregson. His classes have also used information brought back to us by groups like Engineers Without Borders, to address real-world problems with limited resources, like designing a battery charger for a tiny village in Ghana.

Both Dr. Gregson and Dr. Johnston hope to help the faculty educate engineers who will have a broad set of design and analytical skills. “We don’t want them to think in terms of one problem, one solution,” explains Dr. Johnston. “Students need to know how to design successfully even with the uncertainty of the real-world,” says Dr. Gregson.

“At NSERC, we want to make Canada a country of discoverers and innovators,” says NSERC President Suzanne Fortier. “Drs. Gregson and Johnston bring a wealth of expertise in design engineering. The overall strategy and vision of this research program stand to have a significant impact on engineering education and industry, thanks in large part to the support that the co-chairs have assembled and Dalhousie University’s commitment to design and innovation.”