The Concurrent Engineering Design Paradigm is Now Fully Functional for Graphics Education

Engineering design graphics education has come a long way in the past two decades.  The emergence of solid geometric modeling technology has become the focal point for the graphical development of engineering design ideas.  The main attraction of this 3-D modeling approach is the downstream application of the data base to analysis and manufacturing.  In parallel to this development, our group has been implementing a concurrent engineering design paradigm for engineering graphics education.  Many obstacles to full implementation of this educational paradigm have been encountered.  This paper discusses the two major obstacles, design analysis and low-cost rapid prototyping, that have now been overcome.  Thus it appears that, with current technology, the true long-term goal of “Art to Part” seems to now be fully realizable for engineering graphics education.