Taguchi Philosophy of Engineering Quality

Most technology development engineers use traditional reliability engineering methods to calibrate the objective functions of their new systems to meet various marketing requirements. Quality is related to products and services to customer satisfaction. Cost reduction and quality improvement is vital to business. Therefore it is no surprise that both consumers and management are so obsessed with the term quality that a separate branch of quality engineering has been developed. Quite a few glorified terminologies have cropped up such as total quality management (TQM), Quality Function Development (QFD), ISO9000, Continuous quality improvement or KAIZEN, and more popularly six sigma design. These are management-oriented and rather incomprehensible to an average engineer. In contrast, Taguchi methods are easier to comprehend and adopt. They are also based on some common sense ideas. The management's interest was evoked owing to the claimed economic consequences of Taguchi methods of reduced cost with improved quality and consequent consumer satisfaction.

Understanding Engineering Design and Its Social, Political, and Moral Dimensions

This chapter covers two central issues in the philosophy of engineering design. The first concerns the nature, structure, and function of engineering design. Building on the existing literature, the chapter provides an account of engineering design from a bird’s eye view, asking what kind of practice it is, how it relates to other human practices (including other forms of design and other forms of engineering), and how engineering design processes are typically structured. The second issue concerns the moral, social and political choices embedded in design. The chapter investigates what a good design is from the perspective of ethics and society, how new designs can affect society in positive and negative ways, and how design processes can be supportive of values and ideals of a good society.

THE IMPLICIT CANADIAN RESEARCH AGENDA FOR ENGINEERING EDUCATION: 2019

Given the growth of the engineering education community in Canada, we argue that a research agendathat reflects our own identity and interests is needed. To start this conversation, we conducted a content analysis of the 2019 CEEA-ACEG conference proceedings to investigate the implicit Canadian research agenda for engineering education. We analyzed five characteristics: publications’ stream, level of collaboration, authors’ affiliations and, more importantly, their research topicsand areas. We found that the Canadian EER community is very practice-oriented, collaborative and that mostuniversities were represented at the conference. Also, seven main research areas were identified: Assessment,Teaching and Learning, Students, Faculty, Organizational, Engineering Education Discipline, and Philosophy of Engineering. Among these areas, Teaching and Learning is, by far, the one that received the most attention.