McGill CDEN node

NSERC-McGill Chair 'Design for Extreme Environments'

The CDEN/RCCI network is intended to enable the communication of best design practices between schools, promote the production and sharing of courseware, help inject more real design experiences into the university, and allow all schools to access the best available expertise in areas of detailed interest. The network will facilitate the joint development of multi-discipline design-related courseware modules and put in place the mechanisms to ensure that the practice of design will be central to the education of the next generation of engineers.

CDEN's vision

We envision a time when:

• Canadian engineering schools will work collaboratively to share knowledge, expertise and experience to promote the best possible teaching and learning of design engineering;


• engineering students acr oss Canada will benefit uniformly from advanced methodological, technological and computer-based learning systems, and from intensive interactions with industry;


• Canadian engineering industries will have ready access to academic expertise in design engineering;


• Canadian academics and design engineering practitioners will be world leaders in their field; and


• Canadian design engineers and the products they design will be among the most sought after in the global marketplace.

CDEN's mandate

• to enable communication of best practices between schools


• to enable the production and sharing of courseware


• to help inject real design experience into the Canadian university


• to allow all schools to access the best available expertise in areas of detailed interest

Mission for the DEE Team

Our Mission:
The mission of the Chair includes first and foremost the creation and development of a culture of robust design and sustainability among its trainees.

Our Focus:
The focus of the Champion is extreme environments, which calls for creative, innovative solutions and sustainable solutions to highly challenging problems. The motivation behind both is Canada's commitment to space exploration and Canada's harsh weather.

The Challenge:
The Champion will cater to design projects aiming at the solutions of challenging problems of the XXI century: the preservation of earth as a suitable habitat for humankind and the exploitation of outer space to enhance the quality of life on earth.

The Tools:
To face the challenges of Design for Extreme Environments, we will draw upon:

• The philosophy of robust design, while resorting to our design experience to develop an as yet missing methodology for model-based robust design.


• The concept of sustainability, for any design effort will be futile if the design product cannot be sustained in the long term.

Our Plan:
Training at all levels, undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral, by means of interdisciplinary and project-based courses, besides conferences and tutorials, where the open-ended nature of design problems will be both emphasized and exploited;

Design and development, by virtue of projects calling for innovative solutions, whereby an element of research activity will play a major role;

Collaboration among colleagues and students of various departments and across Canada, thanks to design projects requiring interdisciplinary teams, by means of CDEN and its intellectual and material resources;

Promotion of innovative designs, design practice and design solutions will be implemented by means of: (i) the Seminars in Design for Extreme Environments; (ii) workshops on specific design issues, such as robustness and sustainability; (iii) one- to two-day tutorials on hands-on design problem solving; (iv) continuing education courses on robust and sustainable design; (v) international symposia; and (vi) transferring of the innovative design work generated within the Chair toward the end user, via the Office of Technology Transfer.

Our Vision:
Our vision of an educational environment contemplates multidisciplinary projects at the undergraduate level where:

• First-year Arts students would team up with first-year Engineering students to develop design solutions to real-life social and technical problems.


• Fourth-year Management students would team up with their Engineering counterparts to develop business plans and to prototype new products.


• Ergonomics students would team up with Engineering and Architecture students to propose designs for sustainable working environments.


• Mining and Mechanical Engineering students would team up to conceptualize and develop innovative mining equipment.

The Big Picture:
Become a world leader in design education.