The engineering notebook is more of a practice in traditional engineering disciplines. We use it to document things and key events in the design process.
It’s generally useful to keep a notebook:
- If someone falls sick, other teammates can pick up where they left off.
- Can be used to prepare patent applications and be used in legal proceedings. Good notebooks can and will be used to help win cases.
Guidelines
TL;DR
Be neat, accurate, legible, and thorough. Write as if you were speaking to a future colleague responsible for carrying on your work.
Some general guidelines:
- It needs to be permanent, written in pen ink, in a bound notebook.
- Needs to be clear, legible, and contain necessary information so that any person of equal skill can either repeat the work and obtain the same outcome or successfully continue the work.
- Figures and calculations should be clearly labelled.
- Annotated sketches help the reader understand the data.
- Entries need to be dated (day, month, year) and signed (by witnesses and designers).
- Project titles need to be identified, since multiple projects may be worked on in industry.
- Evidence of research is given.
- Information given in the entries is proportional to the amount of time spent on the design.
- Pages are sequentially numbered.
- Measurement and scaling information is provided.
- Entries should talk about partners talking about ideas or working on designs as teams; and special considerations or problems encountered.
- Tools, materials should be identified. No extra space should be given for future illustrations: do them now or on a later dated entry.
- Ideas should not be fragmented, several days between entries should be avoided where possible.
Usually firms hold onto the notebook at the end of the day, because they own the intellectual property.