Design Principles For Engineers

My academic training was primarily electrical engineering, with a bit of technology management added on top. My early career involved analog and digital circuit design along with software design. I made many "design decisions" that involved choosing components, determining wired connections, and crafting lines of code.

Over time, I became aware of design principles that existed outside of my specific area of practice. Usually, these came from graphics designers and industrial designers working on a project with me. For example, I recall learning about the Golden Ratio, approximately 1.618, which is associated with aesthetically-pleasing forms and has some mathematical significance.

I recently came across this book: Universal Principles of Design by Lidwell, Holden, and Butler, which provides an overview of broadly-applicable design principles. The book covers 125 laws, guidelines, human biases, and general considerations important to successful design. Richly illustrated and easy to navigate, it pairs clear explanations of every design concept with visual examples of the ideas applied in practice. Examples of these design principles include: the Golden Ratio, Performance Load, Shaping, Fitts' Law, Hick's Law, Form Follows Function, and Factor of Safety. Some of these may be familiar to engineers but probably not all of them. I wish I had encountered this book a few decades ago, as it would have been a useful addition to my toolkit.

This book does a good job of introducing each principle, with examples. It will not make you an expert on each one, so some additional study may be required. However, this book will provide valuable perspective. And as Alan Kay said, "Perspective is worth 80 IQ points."