This course addresses the issues associated with a rapidly changing market and the demands for better, cheaper and personalised products, developed within the shortest possible time.Ecological and ‘green’ constraints weigh significantly on engineering designers already and these pressures are likely to increase very significantly during the careers of today’s students. We consider the need for significant change in the design philosophy employed in industrialised manufacture and product development as well as responses to those pressures including legislation and standards, alternative processes and materials and design for resource economy at small and large scale.Design engineers are problem-solvers who bridge the gap between traditional engineering and design. It's a discipline that draws on knowledge of product development, technical design, manufacturing techniques and rapid prototyping to bring new innovations to market. It also focuses on improving existing products and the processes used for making them.Some of the greatest human achievements have come from creative design engineering, enabling the realisation of some truly remarkable change in our world. Design engineering has helped to transform the environment, create incredible super-structures on land and sea, and even helped people travel into the solar system.Design engineering has also developed many of the most important systems and services, from individual right up to global and universal scales. These systems have supported radical scaling up of human activity in a huge range of areas.