Civil Engineering Design Studio 2

ENCN213, ENCN261, ENCN242, ENCN371

ENCI312, ENNR313

ENNR313

Course Coordinator

Roger Nokes

This course, because of its nature, is taught primarily by industry practitioners, while course
coordination lies within the department. This year the Course Coordinator is Professor Roger
Nokes. Kim Parrent, a PhD student in English, will coordinate the assessment of
communication skills and those assessments that contribute towards the Communication
Portfolio.

This course is tightly focussed on the major design project. This year the Project Leader is
Humphrey Archer, the Technical Director of Environmental Engineering at Beca, Christchurch.
Humphrey has developed the project concept and will give the first few lectures introducing
the project.

Assessment

1. You cannot pass this course unless you achieve a mark of at least 40% in each of
the test and the final exam. A student who narrowly fails to achieve 40% in either the test or
exam, but who performs very well in the other, may be eligible for a pass in the course.

2. All assignments must be submitted by the due date. Each assessment describes the
penalty for a late submission. If a student is unable to complete and submit an assignment by
the deadline due to personal circumstances beyond their control they should discuss this with
the lecturer involved as soon as possible.

3. Students in this course can apply for aegrotat consideration provided they have sat
the test, the final exam or both.

4. The mark allocated to each student for the group project will be modified through a
peer evaluation process. Details of this process will be included in the design brief document.

Notes

Civil Engineering Design Studio 2 is an essential course in your civil engineering education.
Unlike the majority of your lecture courses that focus on providing you with the fundamentals
of engineering science, whether it be in geomechanics, transportation engineering, materials,
structural mechanics or any of the other disciplines covered in your programme, Design Studio
2 aims to provide you with a realistic design experience where the emphasis is on high-level
conceptual design.

While studying civil engineering it is tempting to see engineering problem-solving as being
associated with analysing design details – for example the pump in a water supply system, the
beams used in a building, or the piles for the foundations of a bridge. While civil engineers are
very much concerned with such details they must also be able to take large-scale, complex
projects and conceptualise solutions that achieve the specific design goals for the project, while
at the same time being technically feasible, financially viable, environmentally sustainable, and
socially and culturally acceptable. Such large-scale projects never have a single, clear solution.
Many factors need to be considered in making design decisions and your creativity as a
professional engineer plays a key role in producing a solution that meets the goals of your
client.

The success of such large scale projects is grounded in the engineering science of the core civil
engineering disciplines, but that engineering science in itself is insufficient to handle these
complex problems and to produce design solutions that satisfy the many, and often conflicting,
requirements.

Our goal in this course is to provide you with your first encounter with a complex civil
engineering design problem that will require you to think in a different way to the detailed
design problems with which you are rather more familiar. At times this experience will feel
disconcerting. There will not be hard and fast rules to fall back on in making your design
decisions. You won’t be able to look over the shoulder of others working on the same project to
see if they have the right answer, as there simply isn’t a “right” answer. This “blank sheet” type
problem where your creativity, reinforced by your technical knowledge, is free to explore
multiple possible solutions and weigh up their advantages and disadvantages against a set of
requirements imposed by your client, the local consenting authority and other stakeholders, is
exciting, challenging and liberating. This notion of working for a client and finding solutions
that satisfy their needs, and that help them to achieve their goals, is a fundamental aspect of
engineering practice.

To achieve this goal the course is designed around a complex project that you could
realistically encounter in your future professional career. The course resources and activities are
specifically designed to support your development as a design engineer such that by the end of
the course you will possess a range of skills that will enable you to approach such problems
with some degree of confidence.

In order to bring the flavour of the professional world to the classroom you will do the majority
of the work in this course as part of a team of four or five members. Your team will be
supported by a practising engineer who will act as a mentor throughout the semester, offering
you guidance and advice on how you might tackle the problem you are confronted with. Their
perspective will provide you with an insight into how professional design engineers approach
complex problems.

It is our hope that you will find this experience stimulating and educational and leave you with
a sense of what might lie in store for you in your future career.

Indicative Fees

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.