Open-ended Design Research Articles

Stock Images, Filler Content and the Ambiguous Corporate Message

Stock Images, Filler Content and the Ambiguous Corporate Message

Biomimetics: Biologically Inspired Technologies (Bar-Cohen, Y., Ed.; 2006) [Book Review

Various aspects of the field of biomimetics are covered in this 20-chapter, 42-contributor, 65-reviewer, single-editor textbook. The book starts with a very good overview of biomimetics and several of the applications humans have made that have parallels in nature. Among the topics covered are: sarcomere design, arrangement, and muscle function; mechanization of cognition; evolutionary robotics and open-ended design automation; genetic algorithms; robotic biomimesis of intelligent mobility, manipulation, and expression; bio-nanorobotics; biologically inspired optical systems; biological materials in engineering mechanisms; interfacing microelectronics and the human visual system; artificial support and replacement of human organs; and nastic structures. The book concludes with a summary of where the state of the art is on biomimicry and potential applications thereof. The textbook is very well referenced and reasonably well illustrated, with a 32-page color insert for the grey tone imbedded illustrations. Portions of the text could be used as introductory-level material for discussions of biomimetics' value in design. The text could possibly be used for a special topics course in biomimicry, but some parts are especially discipline-specific. The book is recommended as a reference text for many departments of biomedical, biological, and perhaps agricultural engineering.

Electronic Furniture for the Curious Home: Assessing Ludic Designs in the Field

This article describes field trials of 3 electronic furniture prototypes designed to encourage ludic engagement in the home. The Drift Table shows slowly scrolling aerial photography controlled by the weight of the objects on its surface. The History Tablecloth creates slowly growing “halos” around things left on it. The Key Table measures the force with which people put things on it and tilts a picture frame to indicate their mood. The pieces were loaned to different households for periods of 1 to 3 months. Because they were designed for user appropriation, a hypothesis-testing paradigm is inappropriate for evaluating their success. The focus instead was on gathering rich, multilayered accounts of people's experience through ethnographic observations and documentary videos. The results helped assess the particular designs, draw lessons for ludic design more generally, and reflect on field methods for evaluating open-ended designs.

Introducing Design Skills at the Freshman Level: Structured Design Experience

Development of design skills in engineering students at United Arab Emirates University is achieved using an integrated learning approach which consists of structured, guided, and open-ended design experiences. This paper presents a description of the structured design experience in terms of main objectives, implementation mechanisms, and assessed outcomes as applied to freshman laboratory courses in the College of Engineering. These courses are developed to introduce structured design experience through step-by-step, hands-on procedures which guide students to complete particular learning assignments. The coursework spans a wide range of typical engineering practice, such as measurement, calibration, error and tolerance determination, data acquisition, and control. Finally, the course assessment mechanism is presented as a means of ensuring the successful achievement of Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology educational outcomes

A novel approach in integrating product design into curriculum: Toy and entertainment animatron design

This paper presents a novel approach in integrating the product development process into curriculum by utilizing the complex toy and entertainment development areas. A cross-disciplinary course targeting engineering, technology, and art students was designed and offered to accomplish animatronic toy development and entertainment job-shop practices within educational settings. The curriculum was comprised of the following content in the following sequence: introduction to product design, project management and team-work basics, concept development, artistic and industrial design, material and manufacturing process selection, mechanism design and assembly, actuators, sensors, controls, and programming. Mini-lessons were complemented by laboratories sessions, leading to an open-ended design project. Analytical tools and visual means such as engineering graphics, videos/animations, or working models were employed to address different learning styles during the mini-lessons.

Bridging the Gap between Academics and Practice: A Capstone Design Experience

As part of graduation requirements, the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison requires a minimum of one three credits course in a capstone design experience. The main objective of this course is to allow students the opportunity of undertaking and completing an open-ended design project. Supervision of the projects is performed by practicing engineers and department faculty. The course is a practice oriented design class that integrates several civil engineering areas. Special emphasis is placed on integrating constructability concepts with structural engineering, mechanical systems, electrical systems, and other project details. Student groups not only complete project designs, but also perform feasibility studies, value engineering, and prepare a construction schedule and cost estimate based on the designs they have generated. The objective of this paper is to describe the senior level capstone design experience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Comparing freshman and senior engineering design processes: an in-depth follow-up study

In this paper we report the results of an in-depth study of engineering student approaches to open-ended design problems. We collected verbal protocols from 61 senior (fourth year) engineering students and reanalyzed protocols from 32 freshman (first year) engineering students as they worked on two design problems. The design processes of these student groups were compared. Results show that seniors produced higher quality solutions, spent more time solving the problem, considered more alternative solutions and made more transitions between design steps than the freshmen. This dataset also includes protocols for 18 within-subject participants. These students participated in the study first as freshmen and later as seniors, affording us the opportunity to compare design process changes over time on the individual student level. Finally, this paper includes results for design process differences across the two design problems.

Low-cost magnetic levitation project kits

These low-cost magnetic suspension kits provide students with an open-ended design problem. The performance of the basic system is designed to be inadequate, allowing students to apply their knowledge to implement improvements in sensors, magnetics, power electronics, and compensation electronics. In the first offering of this lab project, student reaction was positive. The low cost of the kits allows each student to personalize their kit and keep the finished product at the end of the term. This laboratory assignment was successful in providing an open-ended design challenge, providing the students with real hardware experience and providing publicity for the class.

Applications of Engineering Mechanics in Forensic Engineering

The inclusion of examples from engineering practice in the classroom is a key to generating student interest and motivation. Ideal examples allow students to apply both concepts from course material and creative problem-solving methodology to a ‘real world’ problem. While open-ended design problems are often used as case studies in upper-level engineering courses, students in the early phases of their academic career often lack the background necessary to handle even simple design case studies with proficiency. Therefore, the practical use of design case studies is extremely limited in first two years of an engineering curriculum, and is limited to trivial exercises or closed-ended parametric optimization problems. As an alternative, case studies involving the investigation and reconstruction of accidents involving engineering systems can be employed. Such case studies allow the students to demonstrate their engineering problem-solving skills, requiring the students to propose a likely accident scenario and prove their scenario using engineering analysis and the formal scientific method. In this paper, the use of forensic engineering case studies in an introductory mechanics course sequence is outlined. Three case studies involving the use of statics, dynamics, and mechanics of materials are presented.

FlexiMine – A Flexible Platform for KDD Research and Application Development

FlexiMine is a KDD system designed as a testbed for data-mining research, as well as a generic knowledge discovery tool for varied database domains. Flexibility is achieved by an open-ended design for extensibility, thus enabling integration of existing data-mining algorithms, new locally developed algorithms, and utility functions such as visualization and preprocessing. Support for new databases is simple and clean: the system interfaces with a standard database server via SQL queries and thus can handle any application database. With a view of serving remote, as well as local, users, internet availability was a design goal. By implementing the system in Java, minor modifications allow us to run the user-end of the system either as a Java applications or (with some limitations on the user) as a Java Applet. This paper reviews the architecture, design and operation of FlexiMine and presents some of the new ideas incorporated in the data-mining algorithms (Association rules, Decision trees, Bayesian knowledge-bases and Meta-queries).

Container-Handling Crane: A First-Year Engineering Student Project

This paper describes a project suitable for first-year undergraduate engineering students, which integrates civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering concepts into an open-ended design and construction project. The project is a model crane, which simulates a shipping container handling system and is suitable for inter-team competition. The design criteria, materials, and competition rules are presented. As well, a series of short lecture topics, demonstrations, and facilitating homework assignments are outlined. This project and the associated supporting materials meet the goals of being relatively inexpensive while exposing the students to a broader perspective of the engineering profession and retaining their interest in engineering.

Emerging opportunities for binary tools

In recent years, binary instrumentation and optimization tools have been used effectively to understand and improve performance of significant programs. However, new opportunities are emerging in the distributed computing model of the Internet that has strong requirements for reliability and performance. These systems demand continuous operations in presence of open-ended design where some parts may be operated by third party services. Because we cannot reproduce the scale and complexity of this environment on our desktops or in our labs, our traditional testing-based approaches to correctness and performance optimization will prove insufficient; these tasks must extend beyond the traditional idea of product development.In the past, compilation has been about turning source code into executables, balancing compilation speed against code optimization. Binary tools "hacked" their way into the compilation process by intercepting and transforming executables; binary modification stage was not designed to be part of the compilation process. In the new environment, the definition of compilation must broaden: compilation will start very early---perhaps when we write the specification of a program---and continues very late---perhaps through all the program's various executions on the client machines.This dynamic and heterogeneous environment provides great challenges and opportunities to expand the role of binary tools. This talk discusses the new opportunities and requirements for binary tools. It also describes Vulcan, a second generation technology that is designed to address some of these challenges. Vulcan has both static and dynamic code modification capabilities. It can provide system level analysis with heterogenoeus programs. Vulcan works in the Win32 environment and can process x86, IA64, and MSII binaries. Vulcan can process large commercial applications and has been used to improve performance and reliability of Microsoft products in a production environment.

Developing a Systems Approach to Engineering Problem Solving and Design of Experiments in a Racecar‐Based Laboratory Course

AbstractA capstone mechanical engineering laboratory course is being implemented at the University of South Carolina that develops the student's abilities to analyze complex mechanical and thermal systems, to design experiments, and to develop their professional skills. The course is based upon an integrated sequence of laboratory experiments on a Legends‐class racecar. This vehicle is chosen as the system of study because it provides opportunities for the students to apply the spectrum of their mechanical engineering knowledge. It's also exciting to the students. As the students progress through the series of experiments, they are increasingly involved in experimental design (selecting sensors, sensor locations and experimental operating conditions). The course culminates in a truly open‐ended design of an experiment of their choosing. This course development project is supported by the National Science Foundation's Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement Program, the NSF's Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement Program, and the University of South Carolina. This paper describes the work in progress.

Designing and implementing hands-on robotics labs

As part of a rigorous robotics curriculum at Carnegie Mellon University, the authors have developed and implemented open-ended design and construction lab experiences. The hands-on, heads-on laboratory component to the new robotics course described provides a self-learning experience for engineering and computer science undergraduates, enriching their robotics education and teaching interdisciplinary teamwork.

A Computational Environment For ExtractingRules From Databases

Classification for very large databases has many practical applications in Data Mining. Thus, Machine Learning algorithms should be able to operate in massive datasets. When a dataset is too large for a particular learning algorithm to be applied, there are other ways to make learning feasible; preprocessing techniques and dataset sampling can be used to scale up classifiers to large datasets. In this work we propose a computational environment based on two architectures, one for data pre-processing and one for post-processing which allow evaluation of induced knowledge. The two architecture share a set of learning systems, which can be enhanced to support new ones. The environment is designed as a test-bed for Data Mining research, as well as a generic knowledge discovery tool for varied database domains. Flexibility is achieved by an open-ended design for extensibility, enabling integration of existing Machine Learning algorithms, support functions for pre-processing as well as new locally developed algorithm and functions.

Agent-Based Synthesis of Electromechanical Design Configurations

A new automated approach to engineering design known as A-design is presented that creates design configurations through the interaction of software agents. By combining unique problem solving strategies, these agents are able to generate solutions to open-ended design problems. The A-design methodology makes several theoretical claims through its combination of multiagent systems, multiobjective design selection, and stochastic optimization, and is currently implemented to solve general electromechanical design problems. While this paper presents an overview of the theoretical basis for A-design, it primarily focuses on the method for representing electromechanical design configurations and the reasoning of the agents that construct these configurations. Results from an electromechanical test problem show the generality of the functional representation. [S1050-0472(00)00701-7]

Designing representations of terrain: a study in meta-representational competence

I investigate students' ability to design and refine representations of model and real landscapes. Two premises lie behind this line of work. First, the creation and the use of representations are prominent activities in professional scientific practice. Thus, having students become proficient designers of representations appears to be a worthy goal. Second, students seem to possess a great deal of knowledge regarding ways of representing aspects of the world on paper, and such knowledge can be profitably used in learning canonical ways of representing landscapes. I pursue several parallel lines of analysis. First, I survey the representational forms students generate when engaged in open-ended design activities in which they are asked to create representations of terrain. Based on a categorization of students' works, I then present a preliminary identification of the knowledge implicated in the creation of such representational forms. We call this prior knowledge constructive resources. I describe two broad classes of constructive resources: drawing and the use of colors for representational purposes. In addition to constructive resources, I also preliminarily address students' use of criteria for judging the adequacy of their designs. Together with constructive resources, design criteria are main elements shaping students' performance in the proposed tasks. Finally, as a way to suggest paths that students could take towards more normative forms of representing terrain, I identify continuities between students' spontaneous representational practices and those of standard scientific practices.

A comparison of freshman and senior engineering design processes

In this paper we report the results of an in-depth study of engineering student approaches to an open-ended design problem. To do this, verbal protocols were collected from 26 freshman (first year) and 24 senior (fourth year) engineering students as they designed a playground for a fictitious neighborhood. We analysed these protocols to document and compare the student design processes. The results show that the seniors produced higher quality designs. In addition, compared to the freshmen, the seniors gathered more information, considered more alternative solutions, transitioned more frequently between design steps and progressed further into the final steps of the design process.

Techniques in a pseudocorporate environment [engineering education

This paper describes a strategy which was developed to effect desired behavioral change in a junior year electronics design laboratory course, corequisite to a second electronics course. Since any such strategy requires a schedule of reinforcement, the setting of the course was changed to that of a new employee orientation and probationary program with the instructor serving as Manager of Engineering and the Teaching Assistants serving as staff engineer-mentors. A pseudocorporate philosophy was adopted and rigorously implemented, including standards for written and oral communications, corporate e-mail and performance evaluations. Open-ended design projects were assigned by memos giving customer needs including electrical power and cost constraints. Initial student feedback indicates that, despite time constraints, this approach not only forces students to face open-ended design problems and professional communications in a new may, but also confronts them with the need to achieve a certain of intuitive understanding of the subject as opposed to the memorization of equations and problem unique solution patterns.

Design and Hands-on Experiences for Undergraduates: Case Study on Design, Construction and Testing of Small Aircraft Models

This article describes the development of a new design course in the Aerospace Engineering curriculum at the University of Missouri-Rolla offered during the second (sophomore) year. The course is designed to offer learning opportunities that apply the fundamentals of design along with hands-on experience. The students are required to analyse and solve open-ended design problems, test and experiment with different concepts, build models that illustrate what they have proposed in the analysis phase, and use engineering process skills such as teamwork and development of technical reports. An emphasis is placed on the connection between theory and design applications, comparisons of analytical work with test results, reporting, and working with peers. Details of the course content, organization, and guidelines to develop small aircraft models along with the testing hardware needed are given.