LEONARDO DA VINCI – PRECURSOR OF ENGINEERING DESIGN

In our opinion, engineering design has its precursors in the Renaissance. The most prominent repre-sentative of this period was Leonardo da Vinci. One of the most innovative aspects of Leonardo's engineering design contribution is his analysis of the components of machines. He was the first to regard machines not as an indivisible whole, but as an assemblage of distinct parts. He reasoned that by understanding how each separate machine part worked, he could modify them and combine them in different ways to improve existing machines or create inventions no one had ever seen before. We could formulate the assertion that Leonardo was a precursor of the innovative method searching new solutions by means of the so-called morphology matrix.