Cambridge Engineering Design Centre (IMRC Renewal)

Engineers at the University of Cambridge are building the theoretical foundations and software tools that will let future design teams create safer, cheaper, and more reliable products. The problem is that engineering design today still relies heavily on intuition and experience, with no unified scientific framework to guide decisions. This gap leads to costly redesigns, safety failures, and products that exclude older or disabled users. The Cambridge Engineering Design Centre (EDC) tackles this by developing formal models of the design process itself—how teams work, how changes propagate through a product’s development, and how knowledge is captured and reused. The research spans six themes: designing for patient safety in healthcare, making products usable by older and disabled people, modelling the design process, tracking design changes over time, understanding how designers actually work in practice, and creating computational tools for integrated optimisation. If successful, the work will produce software and methods that quietly improve the quality of everything from medical devices to household appliances, reducing waste and preventing failures before they happen.