This 90 minutes lecture to be delivered via telelink addresses a class of mit undergraduates unrolled in Engineering Design and Rapid prototyping Course. The students have been introduced to the basic optimization concepts of design variables design space, objective function, constraints and numerical search methods. Building on this elementary basis, the purpose of the lecture is to make the students aware of a reaud range of theoretical and practical issues that arise when optimization is applied in real-life engineering. To that end a gamut of topics is presented with emphasis on the qualitative exposition rather than in-depth mathematics. The topics include