Negotiations are common in engineering design, especially on large projects, and are typically conducted informally. Often, negotiation is used to handle the imprecision or uncertainty that is inherent in the design process. Performance targets, initially specified as hard numerical constraints, are adjusted throughout the design process in negotiations between engineers and managers. Crucial unmeasured or unmeasurable aspects of performances, such as aesthetic concerns, are commonly negotiated. Negotiations settle conflicts between engineering groups over values of shared design variables and distribution of limited design resources. In this thesis, a formal description of negotiation in engineering design is presented. This formal model builds on earlier work at Caltech in the modelling of imprecision in engineering design. Negotiation is modelled mathematically as the aggregation of preferences. A complete characterization of the aggregation problem and of the aggregation operators...

Reliable systems have always been built out of unreliable components [1]. Early on, the reliable components were small such as mirrored disks or ECC (Error Correcting Codes) in core memory. These systems were designed such that failures of these small components were transparent to the application. Later, the size of the unreliable components grew larger and semantic challenges crept into the application when failures occurred. Fault tolerant algorithms comprise a set of idempotent subalgorithms. Between these idempotent sub-algorithms, state is sent across the failure boundaries of the unreliable components. The failure of an unreliable component can then be tolerated as a takeover by a backup, which uses the last known state and drives forward with a retry of the idempotent sub-algorithm. Classically, this has been done in a linear fashion (i.e. one step at a time).

The human-computer interaction community is an umbrella for many disciplines. Conflicts occur from time to time, in particular between scientists and designers. This article compares the quality criteria used in design with those used in science, in order to gain insight into what design can contribute to the development of science. From the scientific perspective, the weakest point of design knowledge is its limited generalizability.

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There has been a great deal written about curriculum for teaching systems development, but very little said about the methods and practices of the teaching process itself. This article, in the form of an open letter to colleagues, addresses itself to the problems and experiences we have had in teaching systems development. Specifically, it focuses on the contradiction between education and experience and suggests some metaphors and methods for better integrating experience into the learning process.

Design has evolved from a craft into an academic discipline, but it still falls short on defining its own science. I review previous approaches to Design Science and conclude that the subject– object dualism is the one of the main obstacles. I then apply the Metaphysics of Quality to overcome the dualism and propose Quality as the phenomenon of Design Science. Next, I propose to utilize the analysis of interaction effects as a mean to investigate Quality. Last, I recommend steps we can take to mature this new Design Science and strategies how we can gain the acknowledgement of the other sciences.

University. The program is a post-experience education focusing mainly on engineers with more than three years of practical experience. The idea underlying the division of the MMT program into four terms is primarily to create an understanding of strategy and strategic challenges (first term) and to relate these to organizational options and challenges (second term). Subsequently, the program strives to ensure a basis for holistic planning of corporate development. During the third term, focus is on planning of corporate development, and during the fourth term managerial aspects in connection with implementation are addressed. As a part of the curriculum at Aalborg University the program is designed as a problem-based and project-based learning initiative.

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There are too few centers for the improvement of whole individuals in social contexts, an area where widely influencing experiments can be explored. This proposal outlines a 3 year plan for the development of a not-for-profit, membership-based, community-centered improvement center, combining an ever-changing calendar of talks, workshops, and seminars with facilities for personal development, craft work, and holistic health. There is also a strong humanist undercurrent with social and societal goals. This document describes the founding principles, constitutional structure, a schedule of goals, and financial projections. This is a frank, internal document, and not meant

Enormous demands for online degrees in higher education have increased the pressure on universities to launch web courses and degrees quickly and, at times, without properly attending to the quality of these ventures. There is scarce research that defines which quality indicators are used to assess cyberlearning environments, how different stakeholders view the relative importance of these quality indicators in online graduate degree programs from fields like science and engineering that have a historical preference for formal program accreditation, and what practices are used in evaluating completely online graduate degree programs in higher education. This mixed methods study examined current practices in three established online degree programs in agriculture and engineering at the University of Illinois, identifying quality indicators and evaluation practices used with cyberlearning environments in these fields and comparing myriad stakeholder views regarding the value of these practices. Data collection in this study used a mixed-methods approach, including a combination of surveys (n = 107) and interviews (n = 27) with program administrators, faculty, and students, as well as a document review from the different programs. While most of the evaluation occurring in the programs is informal, analysis of the surveys, interviews, and documents collected from