During the past several years a number of design-centered “global” approaches have been offered that deal both with materials synthesis and with the manufacture of materials into finished products. Although the structure and constituent components of these approaches differ because of their different end purposes, they share major dependencies upon design, theoretical modeling, extensive computations, and confirming measurements using various NDE techniques. Materials-by-Design (MBD) is an example of these approaches that is focused on the synthesis of materials. As noted by Eberhard[l], a principal purpose of Materials-by-Design is to produce materials with prescribed macroscopic material properties by designing and controlling material structures at the atomic and molecular levels. At the other end of the spectrum, Unified Life Cycle Engineering (ULCE)[2] is an example of a “global” model for manufacturing. In this case, emphasis is placed upon the development of ways to predict the total set of important properties of a product–performance, quality, reliability, maintainability, and life cycle costs–at the designer's board. Taken together, these approaches offer the opportunity for designer-controlled materials with specified material properties to be fabricated into components of specified performance, quality, reliability, and cost. Even though this combination represents an idealistic vision which may never be perfectly realized, the potential payoff is so large that even imperfect realization may be worth a significant investment. Efforts in these directions can now be made because of the convergence of theoretical, instrumental, and computational techniques.