Evolving from Single Disciplines to Renaissance Teams

Abstract

Center (EDRC) brought in-house a stereolithography apparatus (SLA), providing three-dimensional additive manufacturing capability. As an experiment in collaborative multidisciplinary design, we created an SLA housing for a small single board computer that had been automatically generated by an electronic computer-aided design system (ECAD) that synthesizes computer systems from specifications (Gupta et al. 1993). The housing was designed by an electrical engineer (EE) and most resembled a Howe Truss bridgethe mechanical design taught to EE students at the time. In addition, the only way to reach the computer reset button was by thrusting a finger through the cooling fan blade. Thus was motivated the formation of our first multidisciplinary team composed of a software, electrical, and mechanical engineers, and a designer from fine arts to design and build our first wearable computer in 1991. VuMan 1 (Siewiorek and Smailagic 1993) had a shoulder strap supporting a housing with a raised hand rest allowing easy access to buttons for control. The hand rest also served as a chimney for convection cooling from the largest heat producing electronic chips that were clustered under the hand rest. In the same time frame, Randy Pausch, co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) taught a course on Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) that engaged students from computer science, engineering, social science, fine arts, and design. Five student multidisciplinary design teams were formed that researched themes, wrote scripts, created choreographies, generated graphics, and animated a unique virtual world in only 2 weeks. Then the team membership was scrambled