Perspective on teaching

The primary objective of my teaching activity is to help students acquire the knowledge, skill, and values they need to become good structural designers.

My teaching is guided by the following principles:

1. Design is what engineers do. Design is neither sideline, byproduct, spin-off, nor afterthought of engineering. Rather, it is design that gives engineering its very purpose. It is incorrect to distinguish between design engineering and the rest of engineering, since everything we do as engineers must ultimately be directed towards the objective of generating and validating new ideas for useful things.
2. Design is a creative activity. For many engineers, the hallmark of design is the precise validation of existing concepts, a perspective that relegates the generation of new ideas to a position of secondary importance. Civil engineers enter practice, for example, knowing how to calculate the capacity of beams but unable to draw structural concepts from scratch. Without creative thought, designers cannot generate new ideas and are therefore limited to selecting and validating existing solutions.
3. Design can be taught and learned. The ability to design is not an esoteric gift given to a chosen few. Colleagues in architecture, for example, make their living by teaching students to produce creative works and have developed pedagogical approaches to suit the creative aspects of the subject matter.
4. The fundamental elements of design education are knowledge, skill, and values. The design process produces new ideas by combining existing ideas in new ways. The quality of the ideas thus produced depends on three factors: (1) the breadth and depth of the designer’s knowledge of existing ideas, (2) the skill used by the designer in transforming existing knowledge into new ideas, and (3) the values used by the designer to judge the extent to which a given new idea suits its intended purpose.
5. Design must be taught and learned in the undergraduate curriculum. The current curriculum is largely limited to teaching theoretical knowledge. Design education must therefore take place, almost by default, “on the job”. The workplace does have a role to play in this regard, yet it lacks the ability to convey elements of knowledge, skill, and values that are not directly related to short-term profit. The workplace, for example, provides few opportunities to explore unorthodox ideas or to deal with values that go beyond safety and economy. Since the university is one step removed from the imperative of profit, it is the ideal environment in which to teach these critical elements of design.

My perspective on design in the engineering curriculum is discussed at greater length in the following two articles:

The first article expands on how design figures in my long-term teaching plans at the U of T.

The second article examines issues related to design in the curriculum from a historical perspective.