Burning issue on "Psychology in engineering design" by Alwin

No one had ever thought of having psychology integrated within engineering design from decades ago. However, due to competitive markets among the companies and high demands from consumers, engineers have to design a product as user friendly as possible for the consumers and outbid their opponent companies. In order to reduce unnecessary factors that may harm both the engineers and consumers, psychology is hereby applied to aid. This is one of the roundtable discussions for this semester for EG1471.

During the discussion, there are some objections from the students for implementing psychology into engineering design process. Factor such as psychologists do not oppose the knowledge of what an engineer has which may lead to several arguments or delay of releasing a product.

However, in my opinions, there are several advantages for having psychologists. Psychologists are able to assist the company to find the most suitable applicants for the respective positions. As such, the engineers are able to achieve better performance base on their capabilities on the project. In addition, psychologist’s analysis, such as marketing survey with prototype, is able to assist the engineers to improve the safety of the products and reduce the problems found between the human and machine.

To conclude, in every successful industry, psychology plays an important role, which helps to enhance one company’s reputation by providing good products.