Engineering systems in a number of areas are continuing to increase in complexity and scale. Many of these systems, such as autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things, interact deeply with a wide range of users and are profoundly integrated into our daily lives. Formal design methods offer strategies for making good decisions in order to create optimal designs, but work best in well-formulated problems. Real-world design tasks, especially those which involve many users, are often not well-formulated and evolve over time. Our research is focused on understanding how expert design teams incorporate contextual factors, human behavior, and scale into their decisions over the course of the product development process. Results from our work offer insights into methods for delivering more sustainable systems. Some project areas are outlined below.
Project Areas
Complex System Design in Organizations
Our work is focused on understanding how complex system design occurs in large organizations. In particular, we’re interested in helping organizations create more sustainable complex systems. Our work seeks to bridge the gap between practice and formal optimization research. Our research utilizes Multi-disciplinary Design Optimization, qualitative methods, and other tools to identify behavioral phenomena within the organization and system and then quantify the potential impact on system performance.
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Design for Dynamic User Preferences
A fundamental assumption of many systematic product design processes is that customer preferences are independent of time within the time frame of the development process. Dynamic websites use customer feedback to adapt their functionality in response to changing preferences. This project seeks to adapt this paradigm to the design of physical hardware. By combining reinforcement learning with design optimization techniques, this work seeks to improve customer satisfaction over the lifetime of the product in cases where preferences change quickly.
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Engineering for Global Development
Emerging markets have been traditionally underserved in terms of products designed specifically for them. However, organizations from small to medium-size social enterprises have begun to develop products specifically for these areas. A critical component to the successful design of these products is to correctly manage trade-offs between the wide variety of stakeholders. Our research aims to gain a better understanding of the system-level interactions in these markets and offer strategies for designers to make more sustainable products for these growth areas.
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