innovation and design for engineering and systems

VOICED - A Virtual Organization for Innovation in Conceptual Engineering Design

The vision of VOICED is to create an engineering virtual organization that addresses the challenges of synthesizing innovative conceptual designs of increasingly diverse and competitive engineered products and systems through the reuse of existing design knowledge in a cyber repository. As design advancement becomes progressively more difficult and risky to achieve, the ability to efficiently identify and avoid potential failures while archiving and promoting successful novel ideas becomes an invaluable technology that can only be effectively achieved through collaboration of industry and academia.

• The primary research objective of VOICED is to enable designers to generate a large space of feasible design concepts and quickly explore that space to determine concepts that offer better performance and value. The fundamental challenge to this is that generating a feasible concept often relies on personal experience.
• The second research objective of VOICED is to reduce product risks in the conceptual stage of design, primarily by enabling the rapid evaluation of candidate designs and connecting the methods used to generate them to downstream engineering evaluation and manufacturing assessment.
• The primary educational objective of VOICED is to create an environment where educators can develop course material and directions by sharing data and input with educators from around the world, in particular providing an open courseware environment that can benefit novice design educators.
• The second educational objective of VOICED is to create a community where industry can eavesdrop on design education and both have input on content as well as identify topics of interest for continuing education.

NSF Workshop Series: Interdisciplinary Design as an Instructional Discipline

Design is increasingly seen as an integrative discipline in engineering and many other fields, while designing is seen as a multi- or inter-disciplinary activity. In engineering undergraduate curricula, due in large part to ABET requirements, one or more courses with a design “experience” (e.g., a capstone design course) are required. In graduate curricula this approach is less successful since structuring design courses to be instruction in a discipline rather than a guided “experience” is a major challenge. Following the recent successful NSF workshop on interdisciplinary graduate design education, we propose to initiate a Design Workshop Series with the objective to capture, codify, share, and propagate instructional experiences and philosophies across the nation.

The proposed Design Workshop Series will span one year and focus on interdisciplinary graduate design education. Hosting responsibilities will rotate between the three partner universities (Michigan, Northwestern, and Stanford). Each workshop will be two days in length. On the afternoon of Day 1, the host university will provide an overview of its design program and facilities. Day 2 will be an open discussion on specific graduate-design instructional topics chosen to match the strengths and experience of the host program. A fourth workshop will be organized by Penn State and held in conjunction with the 2009 NSF CMII Grantees Conference. All of these workshop activities will be open to anyone to attend, and NSF funding will be used to provide travel support for interested participants with the goal of broadening involvement in the larger design community (e.g., engineering, architecture, industrial design, psychology, business). The outcomes will be a documented characterization of design as a discipline that can be taught, along with curricular templates that can be adapted for local use by institutions nationally. The long-term outcome will be the training of design instructors who approach design—research and teaching—as a discipline.