Summary
Clothed in design, the adventure of invention should both fascinate the engineer and benefit the community. Usually, adventure is a strictly personal affair, and so is inventing, for both are often rooted in the unpredictable. Many inventors are unpredictable, in more ways than one, but others find inspiration within a more ordered context. In fact inventors can be, to a certain extent, divided into two different types.
There are those who are intuitive, whose ideas fall like a bolt from the blue and who find little help in formalised procedure.
In contrast, others think most creatively within a planned framework and, although personal inspiration is still always useful and sometimes essential, it must, for them, be within systematic thought.
Especially at the beginning of their careers, when experience or self-confidence is lacking, young inventors tend to be of the latter type and welcome a systematic approach to engineering problems. This book is intended to guide them in this. It suggests how to select where to begin in inventing, how to select designs and how to select the best of them. These systematic patterns of thought are intended to apply over the whole spectrum of design, not just a local technology, and enable one at least to make a start at tackling a problem and often, I hope, evolve a successful conclusion. And the process of doing so need not be as dull as it sounds.
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- Information
- The Selection of Design , pp. 1 - 2Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1972