Standardisation and the Bottom-Up Design Process

Abstract

Every profession is based on a Body of Knowledge (BoK), and from our brief survey of the history of engineering in Chapter B1 we understand how the engineering BoK developed, and that it is now both very extensive and rapidly expanding. And it is obvious that such a vast body of knowledge (and data) can only be useful if we have some means of finding the information we need for a particular application, so that the BoK must be structured in some way. It is therefore not surprising that there is a strong connection between the structure of the BoK and the manner in which engineering is carried out, in particular, how design is carried out, and this relationship works both ways. On the one hand, we approach a design problem in a manner dictated largely by the structure of the BoK; on the other hand, the structure of the BoK evolves in response to the changing nature of the problems engineering is called upon to solve. So, understanding the structure of the BoK must be an important component of our understanding of engineering as a profession.