Natural Resources Engineering Design Studio 2

Description

Natural Resources Engineering Design Studio 2 is an essential course in your natural resources engineering education. Unlike the majority of your lecture courses that focus on providing you with the fundamentals of engineering science, whether it be in environmental engineering, soil mechanics, transportation engineering, engineering materials 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 natural resources 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 specific characteristics of a wetland, or the sizing of an anaerobic digester. While natural resources 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 natural resources 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 natural resources 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.