Engineering in Time: The Systematics of Engineering History and Its Contemporary Context

Engineering represents an ordered activity of creative design and inventive manufacture of ingenious devices. Its practitioners have thereby stimulated individuals, enlivened communities, enriched civilizations, and contributed to the shaping of cultures. The authors of this innovative text develop a systematic framework for engineering in time, making extensive use of adaptive heterogeneous progressions. When combined with considerations of feedback, feedforward, recursion, and branching an evolving and comprehensive characterization of engineering becomes evident. It is in this blending of chronology, emerging theory, and professional practice that engineering finds its foundational role in innovation design, device reliability, intellectual property, technology risks, public safety, professional ethics, material accounting, and other recurring themes relevant to contemporary engineering. Engineering clearly emerges as a complex and increasingly important profession. The authors introduce concepts and methods -- including a critical definition of engineering -- and selectively adapt symbolic-mathematical relations. The technical level of analysis is suitable for the undergraduate curriculum commonly encountered in colleges of engineering.