More than 15 years have passed since the publication of Engineering Design: A Synthesis of Views. Significant new material has emerged during this time that deserves to be incorporated into the unified view presented in the first edition. In addition, a larger group of people now believe that designing is not just analysis and that research in design offers the possibility of studying a collection of cognitive processes that allows significant insights. Thus, for this new edition, we replace the first edition subtitle with Representation and Reasoning to make its focus more explicit.

Our approach was to leave the first edition more or less untouched while adding material that clarifies, updates, and extends the original text. This new material was placed in sidebars that are keyed to appropriate points in the (original) text. Any new references were added to the end of the book to allow students and scholars to explore topics that interest them in more detail. We hope that these additions will extend the life of the book for another 15 years (or even more!).