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Center Overview

This center has completed their NSF IUCRC award period. Center information here is provided for reference only and is no longer being updated.

The last update is from 2022.

The Center for e-Design is a cooperative research center to accelerate product realization by developing and applying intelligent strategies and tools that integrate, leverage, and enable the processes, personnel, and data of design and manufacturing enterprises.

The Center for e-Design integrates innovation and creativity with fundamental principles of science, mathematics, and engineering in the development, testing, and implementation of new methods and technologies for the design of products and systems focused on faster time-to-market, better product quality, and significantly reduced costs. It focuses its efforts in three major areas to deliver value to its industry and government partners:

  • Fundamental research focuses on creating methods, tools, and technologies to address industry needs in e-tools-enabled product development and realization, including integrating design information and knowledge; enhancing information structure; enhancing design innovation through collaborative design and manufacturing; and incorporating intelligence into the product development life cycle.
  • Research test bed focuses on the integration of interdisciplinary research activities to validate developed tools, methods, and technologies.
  • Engineering education and technology transfers focus on educating a new generation of engineers and scientists proficient in e-design and rapidly transferring results into usable applications for industry and government.

Universities

  • Northeastern University
  • University of Cincinnati
  • Oregon State University
  • University of Virginia
  • University of Massachusetts, Amherst
  • University of California, Davis
  • Wayne State University
  • University of Texas, Dallas
  • Pennsylvania State University
  • University of Connecticut
View Center Website

Center Personnel

James Lambert
Center Staff
+1 434 924 4270
lambert@virginia.edu

Kemper Lewis
Center Co-Director
+1 541 737 7035
kelewis@buffalo.edu

John Chandy
Center Staff
+1 860 486 3622
john.chandy@uconn.edu

Sundar Krishnamurty
Center Co-Director
+1 413 545 0297
skrishna@ecs.umass.edu

Kyoung-yun Kim
Center Co-Director
+1 313 577 4396
kykim@eng.wayne.edu

John Emmert
Center Staff
+1 513 556 4358
john.emmert@uc.edu

Yiorgos Makris
Center Staff
+1 972 883 2313
yiorgos.makris@utdallas.edu

Chris Hoyle
Center Co-Director
+1 541 737 7035
chris.hoyle@oregonstate.edu

Yunsi Fei
Center Staff
+1 617 373 3004
yfei@ece.neu.edu

Irem Tumer
Center Staff
+1 541 737 4933
irem.tumer@oregonstate.edu

Gul Okudan-Kremer
Center Co-Director
+1 515 294 0127
gkremer@iastate.edu

Houman Homayoun
Center Staff
+1 530 754 7700
hhomayoun@ucdavis.edu

John Salmon
Center Co-Director
+1 801 422 7135
johnsalmon@byu.edu

Daniel Finke
Center Director
+1 814 865 5178
daf903@psu.edu

Research Focus

Design education

The objective of design education research is to prepare and support students and practitioners to take on current and future challenges in engineering design. Research focuses on improving design pedagogy through training on new design tools and methods, integrating design thinking into engineering design processes, and providing training on and understanding decision-making under uncertainty in local, distant, and distributed learning environments. The ultimate goal is to prepare individuals for careers in intelligent product and system design, development, and realization.

Information infrastructure

The objective of information infrastructure research is to explore and develop new software, hardware, information modeling approaches (e.g., ontologies), and secure data handling processes and storage necessary to improve the product development processes that corporations and their supply chains use.

Innovation

The objective of innovation research is to develop new engineering design processes and methodologies to improve creativity and innovation in the design of products, systems, production systems, and supply chains. This research focuses on collaboration tools, measuring and improving creativity in the designs of products and service systems, and social-centric design processes.

Integration

The objective of integration research is to develop new methods and tools that more closely integrate engineering design with engineering analysis, manufacturing, supply chain, maintenance, sustainability, and the end user. Research focuses on the integration of information, knowledge, tools, and models across the product life cycle to enable innovative designs, decreased time to market, and reduced total life cycle costs.

Intelligence

The objective of intelligence research is to develop methods that enable better and faster decision-making through intelligent, data/information-driven, and model-based systems. Research in this area focuses on the development of tools, methods, and algorithms that enhance capabilities of the designers through collaboration with computing resources such as artificial intelligence, cloud-based digital design, data mining, sensor and sensor networks data science, and machine learning.

Awards

The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the Center author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation.