Reducing Barriers to Interdisciplinary Design Teams

Author(s):  
Tim Hight ◽  
Chris Kitts

The proportion of Santa Clara University School of Engineering interdisciplinary senior design teams has been rising over the last five years. While many of those teams have been very successful, there has been a significant overhead price paid by the team members who chose to tackle these projects. Since the spring of 2004, an interdisciplinary team of faculty at SCU has been working to reduce the obstacles that have hindered interdisciplinary design teams in the past. Each department had independently developed its own processes and time schedule over the years, and the variations inherent in these separate programs had created some significant difficulties for the students trying to satisfy incongruent requirements. Recent advances have focused primarily on three departments: Mechanical, Electrical, and Computer Engineering. Curricular changes across departments include a number of innovations ranging from aligning schedules and deliverables to introducing joint team-building activities. A short history of the development of each department’s approach will be presented, followed by the current, more integral, plan and the issues that have arisen in its implementation. Many of the changes that have been made are closely tied to ABET-related continuous improvement efforts. A strong commitment to enhancing interdisciplinary design team experiences has been a core tenet of the involved departments. Lessons learned and successes will be discussed as well.

1994 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Weimer

One of the most significant cooperative industry–higher education projects in Europe during the past decade has been EuroPACE, the European Programme of Advanced Continuing Education. In January 1993, EuroPACE ceased its broadcasts and re-entered the planning process. By the time this article has been published, EuroPACE should again be broadcasting, but with a somewhat different format and content. In this article, Bill Weimer presents a brief history of the first five years of EuroPACE and analyses the project. He examines key assumptions and decisions made, points out those which now appear to have been in error, and lists the lessons learned. Many of the assumptions and decisions made were correct; some of these are also discussed. This article will contribute the experience and lessons learned by EuroPACE to other joint industry–higher education projects. It may help them to avoid making some of the same mistakes.


2022 ◽  
pp. 234-254

The Problem-Solving Manager makes the approved best practices available across the organization. This chapter presents the flow charts and pseudo-code for developing the Problem-Solving Manager. This chapter also shows that this additional role for the Problem-Solving Manager enables an innovative learning (iLearning) organization. Innovative learning begins with all team members having access to the same knowledge for the current “best way” of solving a problem. This knowledge is where the lessons learned from the past meet the best thinking of the present to learn how to do things better – innovative learning.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (7) ◽  
pp. 1142-1146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas G Kannampallil ◽  
Randi E Foraker ◽  
Albert M Lai ◽  
Keith F Woeltje ◽  
Philip R O Payne

Abstract Data and information technology are key to every aspect of our response to the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic—including the diagnosis of patients and delivery of care, the development of predictive models of disease spread, and the management of personnel and equipment. The increasing engagement of informaticians at the forefront of these efforts has been a fundamental shift, from an academic to an operational role. However, the past history of informatics as a scientific domain and an area of applied practice provides little guidance or prologue for the incredible challenges that we are now tasked with performing. Building on our recent experiences, we present 4 critical lessons learned that have helped shape our scalable, data-driven response to COVID-19. We describe each of these lessons within the context of specific solutions and strategies we applied in addressing the challenges that we faced.


Author(s):  
Anastacia MacAllister ◽  
Eliot Winer ◽  
Tsung-Pin Yeh ◽  
Daniel Seal ◽  
Grant Degenhardt

As markets demand engineered products faster, waiting on the cyclical design processes of the past is not an option. Instead, industry is turning to concurrent design and interdisciplinary teams. When these teams collaborate, engineering CAD tools play a vital role in conceptualizing and validating designs. These tools require significant user investment to master, due to challenging interfaces and an overabundance of features. These challenges often prohibit team members from using these tools for exploring alternatives. This paper presents a method allowing users to interact with a design using intuitive gestures and head tracking, all while keeping the model in a CAD format. Specifically, Siemens’ Teamcenter® Lifecycle Visualization Mockup (Mockup) was used to display the design geometry while modifications were made through a set of gestures captured by a Microsoft Kinect™ in real time. This proof of concept program allowed a user to rotate the scene, activate Mockup’s immersive menu, move the immersive wand, and manipulate the view based on head position. The result is an immersive user-friendly low cost platform for interdisciplinary design review.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel M. del Águila ◽  
José Palma ◽  
Samuel Túnez

We present a review of the historical evolution of software engineering, intertwining it with the history of knowledge engineering because “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This retrospective represents a further step forward to understanding the current state of both types of engineerings; history has also positive experiences; some of them we would like to remember and to repeat. Two types of engineerings had parallel and divergent evolutions but following a similar pattern. We also define a set of milestones that represent a convergence or divergence of the software development methodologies. These milestones do not appear at the same time in software engineering and knowledge engineering, so lessons learned in one discipline can help in the evolution of the other one.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Tavares ◽  
Bruno Masiero

This is a lab report paper about the state of affairs in the computer music research group at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Campinas (FEEC/Unicamp). This report discusses the people involved in the group, the efforts in teaching and the current research work performed. Last, it provides some discussions on the lessons learned from the past few years and some pointers for future work.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erick Guerrero ◽  
Jemima A. Frimpong ◽  
Angelique Hearn ◽  
Veronica Serret ◽  
Welmoed K. van Deen ◽  
...  

This study responds to the gap in knowledge in translating team members’ interdisciplinary knowledge to address wicked problems. We use qualitative methodology to understand the team-building process and response to the opioid epidemic in emergency care. We collected data through direct observation of nine health system science researchers and thought leaders as they performed in team-building activities and semi-structured interviews. The cultural exchange framework informed our selection and assessment of team-building activities, and the science of team science (SciTS) framework informed our understanding of promoting interdisciplinary collaborations. We identified six themes representing three areas: (1) Knowledge Building and Strategy Development (need for interdisciplinary understanding of substance abuse and mental health in the emergency department (ED); interdisciplinary approaches to fight the opioid epidemic in the ED); (2) Team Demographics and Collaboration (prescribing and collaboration; the role of interdisciplinary team composition and effectiveness in the ED); and (3) Identity and Relationship Building (role of professional identity in contributing to interdisciplinary research; building effective organizational relationships in the ED). Members’ personal and professional connections are fundamental for developing nuanced interdisciplinary strategies to respond to the opioid epidemic in the ED. We discuss implications for strategies that promote team building and improve treatment practices.


Author(s):  
Eric L. Hutton

Although studies in the history of philosophy look backward to the past, developments in contemporary philosophy can often contribute to such studies by teaching us how to analyze particular issues more carefully, and sometimes the lessons learned from reconsidering past thinkers in such a light can in turn contribute to current work in philosophy by highlighting problems or approaches that might otherwise go unnoticed. This phenomenon is not limited to the Western tradition alone: scholars of Asian thought may benefit from the conceptual tools offered by contemporary Western philosophers, and contemporary Western philosophers may find value in insights from the Asian tradition. This chapter hopes to provide support for this last claim by means of a concrete example involving contemporary theories of extended knowledge and an ancient Chinese Confucian thinker, Xunzi.


<i>Abstract</i> .—As we move towards an ecosystem approach to fisheries (EAF) in the Gulf of Maine (GoM), it is valuable to collectively gauge where we have been, where we are now, and where we anticipate we might be headed with respect to ecosystem modeling. We do so by providing a brief history of ecosystem modeling in the GoM region, focused on a set of network models at various points in time over the past 70 years. We then describe current and ongoing ecosystem modeling efforts in the GoM region, with a particular emphasis on how they are being used in a living marine resource (LMR) management context. We then discuss how such models could be used to advance an EAF in the near term with a focus on the appropriate application of classes of models for addressing various types of research and management questions. Finally, we highlight major lessons learned from our modeling endeavors in an LMR context in the GoM region, so that we and other regions around the world can continue to move towards an EAF.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Gaffield

At the heart of the emergence and development of the Digital Humanities has been the potential to move beyond the out-dated epistemological and metaphysical dichotomies of the later 20th century including quantitative-qualitative, pure-applied, and campus-community. Despite significant steps forward, this potential has been only partially realized as illustrated by DH pioneer Edward L. Ayers’ recent question, ‘Does Digital Scholarship have a future?’ As a way to think through current challenges and opportunities, this paper reflects on the building and initial use of the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure (CCRI). As one of the largest projects in the history of the social sciences and humanities, CCRI enables research on the making of modern Canada by offering complex databases that cover the first half of the twentieth century. Built by scholars from multiple disciplines from coast-to-coast and in collaboration with government agencies and the private sector, CCRI team members came to grips with key DH questions especially those faced by interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, cross-sectoral and internationally-connected initiatives. Thinking through this experience does not generate simple recipes or lessons-learned but does offer promising practices as well as new questions for future scholarly consideration.


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