Abstract: Mobile technologies provide opportunities to create innovative applications to improve public safety. New mobile services can be composed by reusing existing ones provided by various actors. The realization requires the cooperation between independent public organizations having their own and sometimes even opposing

in engineering design

This paper reports on research conducted on design teams at UC Berkeley over several years at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The paper provides a triangulation of indicators of successful design teams drawn from different research methods. The research sources include questionnaires, team documents, email communication, individual design journals, faculty evaluations, and ratings from external design judges. Computational linguistic algorithms are used to analyze the text documents with a focus on latent semantic analysis and semantic coherence. Sketches are analyzed using a comprehensive list of metrics, including Shah's `variety ' measure for quantifying the breadth of the solution space explored during the generation process. A synthesis of the results provides interesting and counterintuitive indicators for predicting the success of student design teams. This analysis, in turn, provides insight into learning how the student design teams negotiate and learn the design process and can assist educators in improving the teaching of design.

Abstract:. New systems can be designed by composing them out-of-existing software components which are accessible as web services and provided by the service providers. Governmental organizations can act as service providers by providing information or functionality like authenticating. The basic premise is that by reusing components, development and maintenance costs can be lowered and flexibility is created. As such, public agencies are looking for support to create new compositions. Several composition approaches can be found in the literature, however none of these evaluations take into account the e-government specific requirements originating from the involvement of multiple parties having different interests. In this paper we present a composition evaluation approach which extends the existing evaluation approaches by including the multi-actor dimension. We illustrate this method using an example. Further research is aimed at executing the proposed approach and comparing semantic and multi-actor-based compositions methods.

This paper reports on a longitudinal study of lessons learned from a graduate-level New Product Development course taught at the University of California at Berkeley, comparing lessons learned by students during the course with alumni perceptions one to ten years after graduation. Previous research on student learning outcomes in New Product Development (NPD) found that on the last day of class students identify working in multifunctional teams and understanding user needs as their most important lessons learned. This study raises the question of whether or not students maintain the same emphasis on learning outcomes once they have moved on to careers in industry. To answer this question, we conducted 21 in-depth interviews with alumni who took the course between 1995-2005 and are now working in industry. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of the alumni interviews reveals that former students still highly value what they learned about team work and understanding user needs, but see more value in tools for concept generation, prototyping, and testing after gaining work experience. The results reaffirm the value of engaging students in multidisciplinary design projects as a vehicle for developing the professional skills needed in today's competitive new product development environment.

This paper describes a multinational program aimed at teaching processes and methods for sustainable product development using multidisciplinary project-based teams. The foundation course teaches processes for designing sustainable products and services, metrics and evaluation methods through a combination of lectures, project work, and examination of actual business cases. It is to be followed by courses on green manufacturing and pre-commercialization planning. The program features bi-national collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico, motivated by our shared vision for the development of sustainable solutions in a global context. The exploratory foundation course of the program, Design for Sustainability, was taught in Fall 2007 at the University of California at Berkeley with students and faculty members from 14 disciplines and three institutions: University of California at Berkeley (UCB), the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, and the National University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. This paper describes the course content, project experiences, faculty evaluation and student lessons learned from the foundation course as well as a proposed three-phase strategy for future program development.

Copyright © 2008 by Caroline T. Lamb and Donna H. Rhodes. Published and used by INCOSE with permission. Abstract. This paper describes ongoing research that seeks to develop an empirical basis for collaborative systems thinking, defined as “an emergent behavior of teams resulting from the interactions of team members and utilizing a variety of thinking styles, design processes, tools, and communication media to consider system attributes, interrelationships, context and dynamics towards executing systems design”. This type of thinking is critically important to addressing engineering systems challenges, and the research seeks to inform and enable effective systems engineering practice in contemporary engineering enterprises. Focusing on the aerospace domain, collaborative systems thinking is examined through the alignment of enterprise culture and standard technical processes. This paper draws on a variety of literature to compose a definition of collaborative systems thinking and propose a research agenda going forward.

Iteration can help people improve ideas. It can also give rise to fixation, continuously refining one option without considering others. Does creating and receiving feedback on multiple prototypes in parallel, as opposed to serially, affect learning, self-efficacy, and design exploration? An experiment manipulated whether independent novice designers created graphic Web advertisements in parallel or in series. Serial participants received descriptive critique directly after each prototype. Parallel participants created multiple prototypes before receiving feedback. As measured by clickthrough data and expert ratings, ads created in the Parallel condition significantly outperformed those from the Serial condition. Moreover, independent raters found Parallel prototypes to be more diverse. Parallel participants also reported a larger increase in task-specific self-confidence. This article outlines a theoretical foundation for why parallel prototyping produces better design results and discusses the implications for design education.

Teaching (CELT) and the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education (CAEE), University of Washington. Her areas of specific interest and expertise include qualitative and mixed educational research methods, adult learning theory, student development, and women in education.

New Product Development (NPD) classes based around problem-based learning provide an effective vehicle for authentic learning and realistic design experiences. Selfreflection provides one mechanism to expose learning accomplishments to the instructor and help the students develop self-assessment skills for professional practice. As one component of a self-assessment learning process this paper describes a structured ‘lessons learned ’ exercise that focuses on what the students themselves found to be the salient learning experiences when engaging in a multidisciplinary product development process. We present an analysis of over 1200 ‘lessons learned ’ collected from three years of a graduate multidisciplinary NPD class with students from engineering, information studies, architecture, business and industrial design. Students highlighted skills for working in multidisciplinary teams as their most important learning experience, whereas the area of greatest impact in the NPD process was the gathering and analysis of customer and user needs. By breaking down these sections we draw insights into students ' learning experiences and provide implications for design education in terms of skill sets required and recommended course emphases.