MECHANICAL ENGINEERING DESIGN, DOES THE PAST HOLD THE KEY TO THE FUTURE?

Much progress has been made in sustainable design over the past 20 years since the first publications on design for the environment started to appear in the mechanical engineering literature. Engineering design methods now attempt to include environmental considerations and Life-Cycle Analysis is a commonly used approach nowadays. Nevertheless, some fundamental problems seem to be recurring and remain unresolved. More so, some of these problems can have significant effects on the efficacy of design methods. Without consideration or even acknowledgement of these problems, proposed sustainable design methods may not bring us closer to sustainability at all. In this paper, we highlight a few of these recurring problems. Although true sustainable design should also include social and financial considerations, we will focus primarily on the environmental issues in this paper.

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ANCESTRAL ENGINEERING: TOWARDS THE INTEGRATION OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ENGINEERING

Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) ◽

10.24908/pceea.v0i0.3772 ◽

2011 ◽

Author(s):

David W. Fritz ◽

David S. Strong ◽

J. Tim Bryant

Keyword(s):

Engineering Design ◽

Significant Role ◽

Modern Society ◽

Design Practice ◽

Historical Evidence ◽

Collaborative Relationships ◽

The Past ◽

The Future ◽

Research Questions ◽

Significant Opportunity

We have long felt those who modern society has named “Engineers” have played a significant role in the evolution of cultures and civilizations. Working with manual tools and the materials that nature provided, historical evidence has proven that practical, innovative, and esthetically beautiful creations emerged from our engineering ancestors. As with most effective research, understanding the past can lead to optimizing the future, and we propose that it is beneficial to study engineering and design in this context. In this paper we will discuss what we have termed “Ancestral Engineering”, and describe the rationale behind the initiative. Two main themes have emerged; engineers helping archaeologists to integrate engineering expertise into their investigations, and archaeologists helping engineers to extract engineering design practice and methodology from other cultures. Within this framework, several initial project ideas are discussed and a suite of Research Questions is proposed. We believe this is an emerging field, with significant opportunity to develop collaborative relationships with interested engineers, archaeologists and anthropologists to pursue discussions and potential research in this field.

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