Design engineer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Design engineer is a general term that covers multiple engineering disciplines including electrical, mechanical and civil engineering, architectural engineers in the U.S. and building engineers in the U.K.
The design engineer is distinguished from the designer/drafter by virtue of the fact that a design engineer takes care of the inner workings/engineering of a design. While industrial designers may be responsible for the aesthetic and ergonomic aspects of a design. The design engineer usually works in a team of engineers and designers to designing the overall design and the most far reaching parts. He/she may work with industrial designers and marketing to develop the product concept and specifications He/she may direct the design effort from that point. Products are usually designed with input from a number of sources such as manufacturing, purchasing, tool making and packaging engineering.
In many engineering areas, a distinction is made between the design engineer and the planning engineer in design. Planning engineers are more concerned with designing on a more systems engineering level, and overlaps onto the operational side are often necessary. Design engineers, in contrast, are more concerned with designing a particular new product or system. However the design process and concepts will usually start with an ideation session from the industrial designer/s. Analysis is important for planning engineers, while synthesis is paramount for design engineers.
When the design involves public safety, the design engineer is usually required to be licensed, for example a Professional Engineer in the U.S. There is usually an 'industrial exemption' for design engineers working on project internal to companies.
[edit] Design engineer tasks
The design engineers may work in a team along with designers to create the drawings necessary for prototyping and production, or in the case of buildings, for construction. However, with the advent of CAD and solid modeling software (SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Autodesk Inventor, Pro/ENGINEER, NX, CATIA, etc, for example) the design engineer may create the drawings him or herself.
The next responsibility of many design engineers is prototyping. A model of the product is created and reviewed. Prototypes are usually functional and non-functional. Functional prototypes are used for testing and the non-functional are used for form and fit checking. This stage is where design flaws are found and corrected, and tooling, manufacturing fixtures, and packaging are developed.
Once the prototype is finalized, after many iterations, the next step is preproduction. The design engineer, working with a manufacturing engineer and a quality engineer reviews an initial run of components and assemblies for design compliance. This is often determined through statistical process control. Variations in the product are correlated to aspects of the process and eliminated. The most common metric used is the process capability index Cpk. A Cpk of 1.0 is considered the baseline acceptance for full production go-ahead.
The design engineer may follow the product and make requested changes and corrections throughout the life of the product. This is referred to as "cradle to grave" engineering.
These duties may also be shared with industrial designers depending on who is more qualified for each task
