Delivering a total engineering education

The department of Design Manufacturing and Engineering Management (DMEM) at the University of Strathclyde developed the concept of "Delivering Total Engineering" to capture the essence of the teaching, research, and knowledge exchange activity. It is a framework and ethos of the department for its multi-disciplinary and holistic approach throughout the three pillars of design, manufacture and engineering management. This paper defines the Delivering Total Engineering concept from an educational perspective and is used to demonstrate the interconnectivity of the learning and teaching that is needed to innovate in the delivery of capable, competent and confident graduates.

Delivering refers to the principles: demonstration of the requisite tools, techniques, and methodologies to enable undergraduates to become competent practitioners in preparation for an industrial career.

Total refers to the scope: to deliver an education that encompasses the entire through-life, lifecycle to lifecycle design, engineering and management. The term “total” is used with the same intention as in Pugh’s Total Design or as in Total Quality Management, and is an acknowledgment to Stuart Pugh holding the second Professorial Chair in Strathclyde’s Design Division in the early 1990s.

Engineering refers to the context in which DMEM undergraduates are educated and which they progress with their careers: the domain or sector of application, for example electrical, mechanical, maritime, civil, aeronautical, and electrical. The capability, competence and confidence of DMEM graduates however prepares them for a wider range of opportunities in sectors including finance, service industry, and global IT industries.

The Delivering Total Engineering concept was formalised as a graphical symbolic spatial model, and secondly from an engineering process perspective. The graphical representation is visualised as a five-dimensional (5D) space to represent the landscape of human, technological and economic knowledge, consisting of axes of considerations, enablers, life phases, management and disciplines as follows:

Consideration axis – evolved from the need to consider an engineering education against different issues and challenges that it might encounter in the areas of metrics, process and product design.

Discipline/Sector axis – corresponds to different disciplinary fields within which engineering education could be placed. There are numerous possible discipline/sector breakdowns including the following for examples: civil, chemical, computer, defence, design, general, health, maritime, systems and transport.

Enabler axis – identifying techniques, tools and methodologies aimed at the Delivering Total Engineering concept in the aspects of co-ordination, design, performance and exploration.

Life phase axis – corresponds to individual phases in the lifecycle, and its interconnectivity from a decision-making perspective that an engineering education is required to consider: e.g. pre-contract, design, manufacture, in-service, decommissioning.

Management axis – evolved from the need to teach many organisational features, such as different management aspects, organisation type and structure as well as operational, tactical or strategic motivations.

A categorisation within each of the axes facilitates a definition and management of scopes of coverage from an education perspective. The Delivering Total Engineering concept is also presented from an engineering process perspective and defined as a potentially cyclic and iterative sequence of states.