For a while there was doubt among those in academia that design could be taught to freshmen in engineering. Clive Dym has made it his mission to prove otherwise.

Dym arrived at HMC in 1991 with a desire to create an undergraduate design course that introduces detail design and conceptual design and its associated methods. His ideas were somewhat controversial because they represented what he called “a departure from the more traditional analytical and mathematical approaches of engineering science.”

Dym also wanted to dispel the notion that design was something imposed upon faculty by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.

“I think that shortly after Sputnik, engineers decided that the field was too empirical and not scientific enough, so that engineering curricula became applied science. Now there’s a growing pendulum shift toward more design balance.

“The argument we make at HMC—and I’m probably the one who makes it the loudest—is that what largely differentiates engineering from science is that scientists see the world as it is and ask, why? Engineers see the world as it could be and ask, why not?”

Dym is a veteran of industry (he worked at a noted consulting firm and a Washington think tank, and was co-founder of an artificial intelligence start-up company) and public and private universities. He came to HMC from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he was a professor of civil engineering and former head of that department, and welcomed the opportunity “to get an undergraduate design course into the curriculum of an established multidisciplinary department.”

At Mudd, he and his colleagues set about the task of making E4 (Introduction to Engineering Design) the cornerstone of the engineering curriculum. The class encompassed teamwork, leadership, communication, ethics, societal impact and creativity, and evolved from one project for the entire semester for each team to now three distinct projects (a conceptual design project designed by faculty, reverse engineering, and design for a not-for-profit client).

At first almost exclusively done in lecture style by Dym, E4 now has been taught by every engineering faculty member, including Patrick Little, J. Stanley and Mary Wig Johnson Associate Professor of Engineering Management, whom Dym credits with advocating and leading toward the current studio approach, similar to that used in architecture and design schools.

“What Mudd does almost uniquely, and certainly uniquely well, is run the spectrum from the cornerstone (E4) to the capstone (Clinic),” said Dym.

More than 1,500 E4 students—some of them HMC non-engineers and other 5-C students—have benefited from the course. And, faculty members have noted that Engineering Clinic, which most of these students take in their junior and senior years, has improved because of it. The formal design methods and project management tools learned in E4 enable HMC to recruit more complex and technically difficult Clinic projects. “E4 graduates have a better handle on how to approach problems and how to conceptualize and structure them,” said Dym.

For this reason, perhaps, Dym enjoyed what he called his “best Clinic team in 15 years.” He advised the team that created a safe and secure methanol fuel cell cartridge for Direct Methanol Fuel Cell Corporation (see page 19).

“Design is one of the backbones of our curriculum. That’s an achievement,” said Dym. “We are a role model, a touchstone, a place where people go for good ideas.”

Dym said that places like Penn State have studied HMC’s engineering curriculum, and Dym spent a sabbatical at Northwestern University helping them create a first-year design engineering course.

Dym’s advocacy for the reform and restructure of engineering education is widely known, as are his articles and books on mechanics and on design, some of which are still in print after some 30 years. Now in its second edition, “Engineering Design A Project-Based Introduction” written with Little, has been adopted by 70 schools (from community colleges to West Point) and has been translated to Spanish and soon to Korean. A third edition is being planned. With colleague Sheri Sheppard of Stanford, Dym is considering a new book that takes a fresh approach to the mechanics of materials. He will also continue to coordinate the biennial Mudd Design Workshops that he created in 1997, which articulate key issues that engineering design educators and colleagues should address.

The American Society of Engineering Education recently honored Clive Dym with the Archie Higdon Distinguished Educator Award for his contributions to mechanics education and by electing him to the rank of Fellow (limited each year to no more than 1/1000 of its membership). In 2004, his contributions to design education were recognized with the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.