Example: An exercise bike that can support 250 lb. Does the engineer find a large enough weight that deforms the bike, then take a fraction of that as the amount it can support?
In: Engineering
For simple structures there are tables that give a lot of information for different materials, like their weight or tensile strength for a given material, thickness, shape etc. they also use design software that simulates the given shape/structure being under load which serves as the baseline around which you begin designing it. Then come the actual real life tests with weights and some times special jigs that apply different forces to it. Lastly comes refinement which is to see if you can reduce the amount of material or complexity of the structure without compromising its overall load capabilities.
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