Preface

Anthony Johnson and Andrew Gibson are engineers with extensive experience in several complementary fields.

Anthony started his career as an indentured apprentice with the U.K. Royal Navy. He worked in a commercial capacity as well as a design capacity in several industries, eventually managing a busy design office for a specialist plant manufacturer. Anthony has performed numerous engineering design consultancy projects during his career at the University of Huddersfield, where he has taught mechanics, dynamics, strength of materials, automotive design, computer-assisted design (CAD), and engineering design for 27 years.

Andrew has extensive expertise in customer-driven product development, technical sales, business strategies, export strategies, and legislation related to engineering. After graduating with degrees in engineering and German, Andrew worked in product development and as customer liaison, moving on to export sales and marketing and thence into the management of international subsidiaries of U.K.-based engineering companies. He subsequently developed a consultancy-based business, working with clients to penetrate new markets and focusing latterly on international trade training.

The raison d'être for the book was the result of several influences: a chance meeting with a sustainability entrepreneur, the need to teach sustainability for engineers in a higher education establishment, the embarkation of a post-graduate research program integrating sustainability principles with design methods, and the opportunity to take the message of practical engineering design out into the world.

This book is essentially a text that covers the formulative approach to mechanical engineering design but also combines methods and techniques that accommodate the principles of sustainability for use by practical design engineers performing their day-to-day work. Sustainability is an increasingly important environmental factor that is promoted by environmentalists, national governments, and commercial enterprises alike, and as such it is required by engineering institutions to be woven into the fabric of undergraduate and post-graduate engineering programs.

When new products are created, it makes sense to incorporate the principles of sustainability, but the only function in the product creation process that can deliver the principles of sustainability is the design function. This text promotes the total design control approach to sustainability and applies it at a practical level.

The material in the book has been drawn from extensive research as well as from the wide-ranging experience of both authors.