ABSTRACT
Over the several years that the author has taught courses in system synthesis, he has greatly enjoyed one part of the work required of students. They are asked to interview a design engineer and report back to the class how they think they accomplish this process. Often the answers are that they do not know. Others have said that ideas come into the mind after intense thought about the problem that are explored further, leading to expressions of design features that might work. This is a creative process that involves what appears to be a chaotic disconnect in the system engineer’s orderly world of deductive and inductive reasoning.
