The study of variability in engineering design—An appreciation and a retrospective

Abstract We explore the concept of parameter design applied to the production of glass beads in the manufacture of metal-encapsulated transistors. The main motivation is to complete the analysis hinted at in the original publication by Jim Morrison in 1957, which was an early example of discussing the idea of transmitted variation in engineering design, and an influential paper in the development of analytic parameter design as a data-centric engineering activity. Parameter design is a secondary design activity focused on selecting the nominals of the design variables to achieve the required target performance and to simultaneously reduce the variance around the target. Although the 1957 paper is not recent, its approach to engineering design is modern. Impact Statement This paper draws attention to a 1957 publication by Jim Morrison and illustrates the concept of parameter design (a secondary design activity between concept design and tolerance design). The 1957 paper was the first in the English language to discuss parameter design and is an early example of data-centric engineering. This paper illustrates that the obvious or intuitive solutions to design optimization can be wrong, even in the simplest of cases as illustrated here, motivating the need for careful data-centered analysis, when solving engineering problems.