In design thinking, extreme users have found work-arounds for common problems, but they are few in number and often overlooked in toolkits and write-ups. This article posits that positive deviance, an approach to social and behavioral change that is compatible with design thinking, offers technical and professional communicators an accessible and innovative methodology for engaging extreme users. The authors analyze a case study of how the positive deviance approach was used to address federal recidivism on the U.S.–Mexico border. They conducted a positive deviance inquiry to arrive at the everyday replicable behaviors that enabled released individuals to complete their terms of supervised release successfully, despite the odds against them and without access to special resources. The authors conclude by discussing the value and implications of focusing on extreme users.

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During the last years, the number of hardware implementations based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is increasing because it satisfies the high speed of system and hardware cost constraints. FPGAs implementation allows the building of rapid prototypes reducing development times and board area. However, since FPGAs has been improved to satisfy speed and size constraints, it is not evident that these devices could satisfy low-power consumption constraint. Compared to ASICs, FPGAs are generally perceived as non low-power consumption devices, whose only advantage is programmability and more recently dynamic reconfigurability. In this work we present an study of dynamic and static power consumption of FPGAs that allows the designer to acquire a better understanding of how power consumption is generated and distributed inside the FPGAs. Based on these results, a genetic algorithm will be used to minimize critical long paths and optimize the internal resources during the Place & Route process in order to optimize power consumption while keeping a high performance. Categories: Circuit Design

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