Engineering Design, 4th edition, by George E. Dieter and
These include engineering drawings, bill of materials,
Linda C. Schmidt. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2009, ISBN:
978-0-07-283703-2
REVIEWED BY: SHAPOUR AZARM1
The first edition of Engineering Design was published in 1983,
mainly for materials engineering majors. However, that and sub-
sequent editions of the book became popular among mechanical
engineering majors. In this fourth edition, the senior author
共George Dieter兲 has been joined by his colleague 共Linda Schmidt兲
to make additional contributions in prescriptive product design
processes. This new edition of the book has 898⫹ pages and gives
a comprehensive overview of engineering design processes for
consumer products.
The authors have organized their book into 18 chapters. These
include the three design phases: conceptual, embodiment, and de-
tailed design phases 共Chaps. 1–9兲, followed by the Design for X
topics 共Chaps. 10–18兲. A brief summary of these chapters is pro-
vided in the next two paragraphs to give the reader a sense of the
breath of materials covered in the book.
In Chap. 1, an overview of the engineering design process is
provided including ways to think about the design process, con-
siderations of a good design, design to codes, and design review
for identifying problems with a design. Chapter 2 presents the
product development process including different organizational
structures, the critical function that marketing plays, and ideas
about technological innovations. Chapter 3 discusses details of the
problem definition, including customer needs. This chapter gives
different views of customer requirements, engineering character-
istics, and the House of Quality which relates customer require-
ments and engineering characteristics. It also gives the details of
the product design specifications. Chapter 4 is on the infrastruc-
ture of the design including team related issues. It provides useful
ideas such as what it takes to be an effective team leader or how
to conduct an effective team meeting, time management, planning,
and scheduling in support of a design activity. Chapter 5 deals
with gathering information. It discusses the challenges in collect-
ing information, types of information, and different sources of
information such as library, government, internet, professional so-
cieties and publications, and others. Chapter 6 presents a variety
of concept generation techniques with their strengths and weak-
nesses. These methods include concept generation by brainstorm-
ing, analogy, association, functional decomposition, morphology,
and axiomatic design. Chapter 7 gives an overview of decision
making and selection tools, including the behavioral aspects of
decision making, decision trees, and evaluation methods such as
the Pugh’s method and analytical hierarchy process. Chapter 8 is
on embodiment design. The embodiment is the phase where the
designer “puts meat on the bones.” It involves three main activi-
ties: product architecture, configuration design, and parametric de-
sign. Additional topics in this chapter include dimensions and tol-
erances, industrial design, human factors, design for environment,
prototyping and testing. Chapter 9 discusses the detailed design
phase where decisions are finalized and the design is released for
1
Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park,
MD 20742.
Journal of Mechanical Design Copyright © 2009 by ASME
production.
final design review, and plans for design and manufacturing ac-
tivities beyond the detailed design.
Chapter 10 is on modeling and simulation. It discusses types of
models, the model building process, dimensional analysis, a short
summary of finite difference/element methods, geometric model-
ing, and simulation modeling. Chapter 11 is on material selection
for design, including performance characteristics of materials,
economics and recycling of materials. Chapter 12 is on design
with materials, including design for brittle fracture, fatigue failure,
corrosion resistance, design against wear, and design with plastics.
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Chapter 13 discusses design for manufacture, including classifica-
tion and selection of manufacturing processes. This chapter also
covers design for assembly, design for forgings, design for sheet
metal forming, design for machining, design for heat treatment,
and design for plastics processing. Chapter 14 is on risk, reliabil-
ity and safety. It discusses the probabilistic approach to design,
design for reliability, failure mode and effects analysis, and design
for safety. Chapter 15 is on quality, robust design and optimiza-
tion. It presents the concept of total quality, quality control and
assurance, statistical process control, and Taguchi method for ro-
bust design. The chapter also gives a brief overview of optimiza-
tion concepts and methods. Chapter 16 presents cost evaluation. It
discusses categories of costs and methods for estimating them.
Chapter 17 presents legal and ethical issues such as contracts and
their types, liability, intellectual property, and solving ethical con-
flicts. Finally, Chap. 18 is on economic decision making, includ-
ing time value of money, cost comparisons by way of present
worth analysis, annual cost analysis, capitalized costs analysis,
depreciation, taxes, profitability of investment, inflation, break-
even analysis, and benefit-cost analysis.
Since design terminology can be a barrier to learning design
practice, these authors made a special effort to be consistent and
use the most accepted design vocabulary. To reinforce the termi-
nology, each chapter ends with a list of New Terms and Concepts.
Many references are given to “classic design papers” and to
sources that extend the discussion of a particular topic. Neverthe-
less, readers need to be aware of choices made by the authors of
the book. For example, the book is more oriented toward product
design than system design, although the design process described
is applicable to both. Design optimization has been condensed
from a separate chapter in the previous edition of the book to a
brief introductory section. The chapter on engineering statistics
has been dropped from this edition. Chapter 17 on Legal and
Ethical Issues in Design, and Chap. 18 on Economic Decision
Making have been placed on the publisher’s website
共www.mhhe.com/dieter兲. This website also maintains Errata, So-
lutions Manual for instructors, and other related information.
In summary, this book provides a balance between extended
discussion of the design tools that are finding acceptance from
problem definition to detail design and the design for X ideas that
are important from an industry point of view. This is a good un-
dergraduate text that should be applicable to almost any under-
graduate mechanical engineering curriculum. It should be a useful
companion to any new engineer starting his/her career. Also, it
would be a useful book for a practicing engineer who wishes to
become more familiar with modern approaches to product design.
MAY 2009, Vol. 131 / 056501-1