Presentation of a design
includes both oral and written
reports.
Source:Courtesy of
DOE /NRELStep 8: Presentation
Now that you have a final solution, you need to communicate your solution to the client, who
may be your boss, another group within your company, or an outside customer. You may have
to prepare not only an oral presentation but also a written report. As we said in Chapter 1,
engineers are required to write reports. Depending on the size of the project, these reports
might be lengthy, detailed technical reports containing graphs, charts, and engineering draw-
ings, or they may take the form of a brief memorandum or executive summaries.
A reminder again that although we have listed the presentation as Step 8 of the design pro-
cess, quite often engineers are required to give oral and written progress reports on a regular time
basis to various groups. Consequently, presentation could well be an integral part of many other
design steps. Because of the importance of communication, we have devoted an entire chapter
to engineering communication (see Chapter 4).
Finally, recall from our discussion in Chapter 1 regarding the attributes of good engineers,
we said that good engineers have written and oral communication skills that equip them to
work well with their colleagues and to convey their expertise to a wide range of clients. More-
over, engineers have good “people skills” that allow them to interact and communicate effec-
tively with various people in their organization. For example, they are able to communicate
equally well with the sales and marketing experts and with their own colleagues in engineering.
In Step 7 of the design process, we discussed optimization. Let us now use a simple example
to introduce you to some of the fundamental concepts of optimization and its terminology.46 Chapter 3 Introduction to Engineering Design
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