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integration,</title></head><body>
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<blockquote type="cite" cite>Does it make sense to you that, despite
the tremendous differences and diversity of cultures, societies,
values, languages, natural resources, and climates that inhabit this
planet, many important product design and deployment decisions seem to
have been made to treat everyone the same? In the VDS project
class, you will have the opportunity to investigate the specifics of
contextualized design and product development in a real-world
scenario. The Vehicle Design Summit initiative, a student
consortium of more than 30 universities worldwide, is designing a
hyper-efficient commuter/passenger vehicle for deployment in India.
This is a project course that supports a number of parallel topics.
These include<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>
<ul>
<li>Product Development & Contextualized Design
<li>Consortium Design & Collaboration Infrastructure
<li>Systems Engineering & Integration</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Descriptions and prompts for each of
these three topics are below.<br>
<br>
You will have the opportunity to work with your classmates in a highly
interdisciplinary setting utilizing elements of X-teams, an adaptive
innovation structure developed by Sloan professor Deborah Ancona, who
is also the primary instructor. You will also be working with
guest professors from all over the Institute, including Ed Crawley
from Course XVI and John Sterman from Course XV.<br>
<br>
The first class meeting is tomorrow!! If you are interested in
seeing what this class is all about, please contact Anna Jaffe at <a
href="mailto:ajaffe@mit.edu">ajaffe@mit.edu</a> and visit:<br>
<br>
<a
href=
"http://vehicledesignsummit.org/website/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=11&id=48&Itemid=89"><span
></span
>http://vehicledesignsummit.org/website/index.php?option=com_content<span
></span>&task=category&sectionid=11&id=48&Itemid=89</a
><br>
<br>
Here are some of the course specifics:<br>
<br>
<b>15.960: Leading the Global Enterprise</b><br>
Instructor: Deborah Ancona<br>
with guest lectures by Prof. Fine, Prof. Crawley, Prof. de Weck and
others.<br>
TA: Anna Jaffe (<a
href="mailto:ajaffe@mit.edu">ajaffe@mit.edu</a>)<br>
Time: WF, 1-2:30<br>
Units: 6-18<br>
Grading: P/D/F<br>
Room: TBD (Contact Anna for info)<br>
<br>
---------------------------------------------------------------------<span
></span>---------------<br>
Project options:<br>
<br>
Product Development & Contextualized Design<br>
<br>
Objectives:<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>
<ul>
<li>to examine the specifics of the scenario in which this vehicle
will be deployed and appropriately guide its design, and
<li>to codify general guidelines for large-scale, high-tech
contextualized design that are extensible to other products.</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>stated another way...<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>
<ul>
<li>How do we integrate elements of car-sharing, community ownership,
and microenterprise into the design and deployment of our vehicle?
How do existing transportation options--both public and
private--interact with this vehicle? Who will actually be
utilizing this vehicle? What is the best strategy for achieving
our ultimate goal, that is, minimization of the negative environmental
and social impacts of the impending personal transportation boom in
the developing world?
<li>Can we generalize characteristics of a "stem-cell"
technology, that is, a highly differentiable core design that can be
easily modified to meet different scenarios? What is the best
way to design such a core technology? VDS is using a large,
extremely diverse group of student engineers and designers. Is
this the best method? How much of the design needs to be
finished in the core? 70%? 80%? Everything but the paint
job and fins? Or is a kit the best way to go--the firm supplies
franchises worldwide with all of the pieces, and they put it together
themselves. A direct deliverable from this inquiry will be
suggestions for the deployment of this vehicle in China or another
developing market of choice.</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite
>--------------------------------------------------------------------<span
></span>----------------</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Consortium Design & Collaboration
Infrastructure<br>
<br>
See if you can imagine the following: a website on which people from
all over the world can interact, tell stories, learn about each other,
and create communities based on shared interests. Members end up
checking and modifying this site first thing in the morning, before
they go to bed at night, and often multiple times during the day, when
they are supposed to be doing other things. Sound familiar?
But wait, what if this virtual space is not geared towards social
networking, but instead collaborative design and engineering? In
this class, you will have the opportunity not only to think and
hypothesize about decentralized, collaborative design, but also to
work with a real-life student design consortium in
action. </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
Objectives of this project:<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>
<ul>
<li>to design and implement the collaboration infrastructure that will
enable the VDS consortium to function and crucial technical decisions
to be made, and
<li>to create modular guidelines for team- and individual-based,
inter-disciplinary, technical collaboration that can be adopted by
schools and companies worldwide.</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>Questions that will be considered
include:<br>
<br>
What tools does one need to participate as either an individual or a
member of a team in a large-scale, collaborative technical design
project? What is the ideal consortium structure to facilitate
collective decisionmaking? How can distributed innovation be
harnessed to develop regionally- and culturally-appropriate
technologies? How can X-Teams facilitate collaborative
innovation? To what extent does previous familiarity with
virtual communities strengthen a consortium? How can the public
be engaged in collaborative design? Where do review points and
quality control mechanisms get implemented? How can distributed
design, open-source hardware, and other community-focused innovations
interact to democratize design and engineering? Is this
desirable?<br>
<br>
---------------------------------------------------------------------<span
></span>---------------<br>
<br>
Systems Engineering & Integration<br>
<br>
As science and engineering students, you often get the opportunity to
disaggregate problems, to make large unsolvable problems into small
solvable ones. But so much of engineering is about building
things up, taking simple systems and expanding them into complex
ones. In this class, you will have the opportunity to
participate in the systems engineering and integration of a plug-in
hybrid electric vehicle. Your role as the systems engineer is
crucial to the success of this project. You will learn about the
strengths and weaknesses of distributed innovation, and be responsible
for guiding the development of subsystems that are being designed
worldwide into a functional vehicle. It is the role of the
systems integration team to ensure the vehicle meets the performance
goals for the project: 200 MPG energy equivalence, 20-fold reduction
in "life-cycle" costs over a baseline.<br>
<br>
Questions that will be considered include:<br>
<br>
What are the major interdependencies between subsystems in an
automobile? How can intelligent systems architecture facilitate
an aggresive design timetable? What are the crucial engineering
decisions that need to be made in order to meet the performance
characteristics? How do we harness emergent properties in
complex systems? Where can modularity play a role in the systems
architecture of the vehicle?<br>
<br>
--<br>
Jonathan S. Krones<br>
VDS Organizational Team<br>
<a
href="http://www.vehicledesignsummit.org">www.vehicledesignsummit.org</a
><br>
<a href="mailto:jskrones@alum.mit.edu"> jskrones@alum.mit.edu</a><br>
(301) 788-4206</blockquote>
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