ENVIRONMENT SENSE OF FUTURE
PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE HISTORY SENSE OF SOCIAL PROBS
FIGURE 1.2 Internal influences on the engineering designer.
For those designers who do start at the beginning, the checklist in Table 1.1 is an example of one that may be used to organize the information required to define the design problem and aid in establishing design goals. An example list of information for a design specification based on the checklist in Table 1.1 is given in Table 1.2.
After defining the problem and setting the goals for the new design, as much search effort should be made as is feasible to gather all the information possible that applies to the design. This effort includes information on other competitive products or products of a similar nature, governmental regulations and codes, standards, field reports on failure and operation, recall, safety and accident reports, information from lawsuits, plus all the traditional technical information provided in design edu¬cation (see Ref. [1.14]).
Some of these information sources have attained importance only recently. One example is governmental regulations which have been promulgated since the late 1960s and early 1970s with a major stated purpose of increasing safety both in the workplace (Occupational Safety and Health Act) and elsewhere (Consumer Prod-