100 Things (or so) a Ship Designer Needs to Know

It is probably invidious for anyone to propose some 100 things one should know about regarding an endeavour as diverse and complicated as ship design, however we are all familiar with little books in bookshops with “100 things and artist/architect etc. should know”, often accompanied by witty cartoons. Alas the latter has not yet to be achieved in this case – perhaps readers can provide their own illustrations to many of the items or more likely add their own. The presenter/author of this listing has provided more conventional keynotes than this to several IMDC conferences. These have included “The Fascination of Ship Design” to the 2006 IMDC at Ann Arbor and “Is Marine Design now a Mature Discipline?” to the 2012 IMDC in Glasgow. As the originator of the IMDC State of Art Reports and since 2015 the International Chair of the IMDC series of conferences, the author has sought to bring together those issues that highlight the unique nature of Ship/Marine Design. Aside from ships being our largest mobile artefacts, the process by which they are conceived and brought to fruition is as varied as there are different vessels and consequently it is hard to pin down. In a recent substantial publication, the author produced an argument that the earliest stages of the design of complex vessels were indeed sophisticated, not least in the decision making that should underlie such a process. A summary of this argument and several other publications attempting to address many of the wider aspects of the process are presented as scene setting to the just over one hundred short statements that are listed as one way to convey to current and future practitioners of this challenging “art”, as summarising “what one ought to know”. The listing is largely due to the author ‘though there are some from other practitioners of ship design that were too good to not include. The author has also found that there seems to be about seven broad categories that the statements seemed to address within the overall ”ship design” field. These are also presented for others to challenge.