[bioundgrd] Fwd: NEW Class on global enterprises, systems integration, distributed innovation

[Janice Chang]

>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
>
>Product Development & Contextualized Design
>Consortium Design & Collaboration Infrastructure
>Systems Engineering & Integration
>Descriptions and prompts for each of these three topics are below.
>
>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.
>
>The first class meeting is tomorrow!!  If you are interested in 
>seeing what this class is all about, please contact Anna Jaffe at 
><mailto:ajaffe at mit.edu>ajaffe at mit.edu and visit:
>
><http://vehicledesignsummit.org/website/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=11&id=48&Itemid=89>http://vehicledesignsummit.org/website/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=11&id=48&Itemid=89
>
>Here are some of the course specifics:
>
>15.960: Leading the Global Enterprise
>Instructor: Deborah Ancona
>with guest lectures by Prof. Fine, Prof. Crawley, Prof. de Weck and others.
>TA: Anna Jaffe (<mailto:ajaffe at mit.edu>ajaffe at mit.edu)
>Time: WF, 1-2:30
>Units: 6-18
>Grading: P/D/F
>Room: TBD (Contact Anna for info)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Project options:
>
>Product Development & Contextualized Design
>
>Objectives:
>
>to examine the specifics of the scenario in which this vehicle will 
>be deployed and appropriately guide its design, and
>to codify general guidelines for large-scale, high-tech 
>contextualized design that are extensible to other products.
>stated another way...
>
>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?
>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.
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Consortium Design & Collaboration Infrastructure
>
>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. 
>
>Objectives of this project:
>
>to design and implement the collaboration infrastructure that will 
>enable the VDS consortium to function and crucial technical 
>decisions to be made, and
>to create modular guidelines for team- and individual-based, 
>inter-disciplinary, technical collaboration that can be adopted by 
>schools and companies worldwide.
>Questions that will be considered include:
>
>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?
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Systems Engineering & Integration
>
>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.
>
>Questions that will be considered include:
>
>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?
>
>--
>Jonathan S. Krones
>VDS Organizational Team
><http://www.vehicledesignsummit.org>www.vehicledesignsummit.org
><mailto:jskrones at alum.mit.edu> jskrones at alum.mit.edu
>(301) 788-4206
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