Linking design with structural mechanics and materials

Educating students in the design of structures has been strongly influenced in modem times by specialization. What in the development of real structures should be an interwoven activity of design, mechanics analysis and materials selection, has been reduced in academic training to three separate activities-leaving the student to work out how to accomplish the integration. It is much easier to teach these subjects in isolation from one another, but the student, and ultimately society as a whole, are left the poorer for it. This paper presents a new approach to teaching structural design. The method centres on the use of a design template, which defines the design space through design degrees of freedom. Within the design template, mechanics analysis and material selection take place in a concurrent fashion. These concepts are discussed in the paper and an example illustrating their use is provided.