CAREER: Building Knowledge Infrastructure for CollaborativeDesign

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This grant provides funds for a CAREER award with goals to explore a theory for collaborative design, develop a knowledge infrastructure to support collaborative design, and create new courses to teach principles of design and collaboration. A new organizational decision-making framework will be developed to characterize collaborative design that views collaborative design as a set of individual decision-making processes that interact with each other through coordination links. Based on the organizational decision-making framework, an agent-based knowledge infrastructure will be developed to support collaborative design. Unlike the conventional Internet-based information infrastructure, the knowledge structure will function as a knowledge media that acquires, stores, and applies knowledge to support designers' decision-making and coordination processes. The new courses to be developed include two academic courses, Engineering Information Modeling and Design Theory and Methodology, and an industry-oriented short course, Emergent Technologies for Collaborative Engineering. The theoretical exploration and technology development described above will provide important insights and materials for the courses. The experiences gained from the courses will, in turn, provide important feedback to the research as well. If successful, this research will contribute to knowledge by integrating ideas and literature of engineering design, collaborative work, and organization theory and by identifying coherent links among the design, coordination and organizing processes. The knowledge infrastructure represents a novel technology direction beyond the connectivity of the Internet and will impact on future development of collaboration support technologies. The new courses address the future requirements for mechanical engineers and aim to respond to the requirements by combining theory of design and collaboration, together with information technologies and add them into engineering design curriculum.