We present a longitudinal study of what graduates take away from a cross-disciplinary graduatelevel New Product Development (NPD) course at UC Berkeley over a 15-year period from 1996-2010. We designed and deployed a longitudinal survey and interviewed a segment of our NPD alumni population to better understand how well our course prepared these alumni for careers in design, innovation, entrepreneurship and product management. We questioned alumni regarding the value of specific NPD skills, methods, and tools taught in the course. This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of survey and interview data. The results reaffirm the value of engaging students in multidisciplinary design projects as a means for developing the skills needed in today’s competitive NPD environment and highlight the similarities and differences that exist between academic and industry NPD practices. We believe the findings will inform educators about what is valued in NPD courses by graduates now working in industry.

TRIZ is increasingly being applied to consumer product development, in which products have to solve more than just technical problems, they have to provide compelling solutions to consumer needs. This paper discusses the use of TRIZ together with Human-Centered Design (HCD), a design methodology evolved for consumer product development. Using a case study, we illustrate why understanding user needs in consumer product development is particularly important, and then compare TRIZ and HCD methodologies. To better understand the appropriate use of TRIZ in consumer product development, we present a framework of Use, Usability and Meaning. Design situations where the emphasis is on a product‟s Use stand to benefit most from TRIZ methods, whereas for product areas with strong Meaning attached, HCD methods provide the most guidance. We finish by presenting some opportunities for successful integration of the two methodologies.

Creative collaborations that cross disciplinary boundaries are essential to innovation. Individuals face challenges, however, in forming new collaborations. Empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that the common formats of brainstorming and free-form networking are insufficient for enabling such collaborations to form. We present a potential solution called speedstorming, a pair-wise method of creative interaction similar to the round-robin ‘speed-dating’ technique. Speedstorming combines an explicit purpose, time limits, and one-on-one encounters to create a setting where boundary-spanning opportunities can be recognized, ideas can be explored at a deep level of interdisciplinary expertise, and potential collaborators can be quickly assessed. A comparison of speedstorming and brainstorming suggests that ideas from speedstorming were more technically specialized and that speedstorming participants were more certain in their assessments of the collaborative potential of others. This paper concludes with a discussion of the method's application in a variety of settings.

This paper addresses two major challenges new product development teams face in making a product people want. The first challenge is to frame the design situation based on a real need of a customer. The second challenge is to get everyone on the team in agreement about what that framing is - everyone needs to be on the same page about what it is they're doing. Yet these two challenges are not independent, they are intertwined with each other, connected by the concrete research and sharing activities the teams perform. We introduce a framework to help understand the path of a design team along these two dimensions as well as illustrations of the three most common paths observed among graduate multidisciplinary new product development teams as supported by interviews and survey data. These case studies form the basis of four themes to help teams navigate the new product development process.

The most powerful scientific advances are propelled by creative ideas that cross disciplinary boundaries. Few fields exemplify this as thoroughly as nanoscience, which promises to benefit humankind by delivering radically new technologies - if scientists from different disciplines can work together creatively. Unfortunately, initiating interdisciplinary conversations can be a costly undertaking in the context of academia,, where disciplines are separated by entrenched physical and social structures. We present a new method, called ‘speedstorming’, designed to improve the process of teaching and initiating creative collaboration. Early results show great promise for accelerating the rate of collaboration formation in the field of nanoscience. We found that for teaching and forming creative collaboration, speedstorming is more efficient and more effective than group brainstorming. This article explores the rationale for using such a method in nanoscience research and education, and details the steps to conducting speedstorming sessions to achieve several of common aims in a variety of settings. Limitations and unanswered questions regarding the method are also explored.

Metaphors have Successfully been used by new product development and design teams to help frame the design situation and communicate new products to stakeholders. Yet, the process of finding a compelling metaphor often turns upon Stumbling upon it or a flash of insight from a learn member. We present Meta4acle: a Metaphor Exploration Tool for design that suggests possible metaphors to make the process more one of 'seeking out' than 'stumbling upon' an effective metaphor. The tool takes data about the project in the form of a title, domain and key associations required of the metaphor and returns suggestions from a database of possible metaphor sources. We built a Meta4acle prototype and evaluated it with positive results for three existing design case Studies. We present plans for its full implementation and evaluation.

A metaphor allows us to understand one concept in terms of another, enriching our mental imagery and imbuing concepts with meaningful attributes. Metaphors are well studied in design, for example, in branding, communication and the design of computer interfaces. Less well appreciated is that our understanding of fundamental design concepts, including design itself, is metaphorical. When we treat design as a process of exploration or when we get together to "bounce ideas off each other" we understand the abstract concepts of design and ideas metaphorically; ideas don't literally bounce, nor are we literally exploring when we design. Our research is a descriptive study of the metaphors employed in design. It is the first phase in a longer research effort to understand the impact of design metaphors on creativity. We investigated whether design authors employed different metaphors for the overall design process and consequently for core design concepts. To address this hypothesis we analyzed the language used in the concept generation chapters of nine widely used engineering design textbooks. We coded each metaphorical phrase, such as "finding another route to a solution," and determined the core metaphors in use for common design concepts including, ideas, problems, solutions, concepts, design, the design process, user needs and others. We confirmed that authors with differing views of design do indeed emphasize different metaphors for core design concepts. We close by discussing the implications of some common metaphors, in particular that Ideas Are Physical Objects.

In our increasingly flat and connected world, skills in innovation and creative design have emerged as key attributes for graduating engineering designers. Metaphors and analogies are commonly voiced as key tools for enhancing creative design yet little research has been performed on their relation to each other and their use within the design process. In this paper we discuss the relationship between metaphor and analogy use in the design process, with a focus on engineering education. We support our discussion with results from interviews and experiments with student designers. Our results highlight that both metaphor and analogy are spontaneously used by student designers and that metaphor dominates as the design tool for early problem-framing design phases whereas analogy dominates as a tool for concept generation. We also present an analysis of the metaphors for our understanding of design in use within Germany, the UK and Mexico. We found an 85 per cent overlap between textbook usages of metaphors in conceptual design in these countries as compared to textbooks authored in the United States, suggesting that cross-cultural differences in design understanding are relatively small in higher education. We close by presenting a design by analogy method to promote and enhance the use of analogy as a skill for graduating engineering designers.

New product development (NPD) classes based around problem-based learning and mediated by design coaches from industry provide an effective vehicle for authentic learning and realistic design experiences within the constraints of academic settings. Little is known, however, about what students actually learn in these courses or whether the learning corresponds to what is required by industry. To address these questions, we: (1) analyzed data from a structured “lessons learned,” or self-reflection, exercise performed by NPD students in a graduate, multidisciplinary NPD class at the University of California, Berkeley each year for the past 6 years; and (2) conducted interviews with our industrial partners who coached the students’ projects. We present an analysis of over 2300 lessons learned and compare the students’ views with the reflections of the industry coaches. In the lessons learned analysis, students highlighted skills for working in multidisciplinary teams as their most important learning experience, and secondarily, within lessons about the NPD process itself, identified the gathering and analysis of customer and user needs. Students commonly referenced skills that are not part of a traditional engineering design curriculum: listening, observation, and performing research in context. The interviews with the design coaches largely confirmed the importance of both the realistic teamwork experience that accompanies NPD and user research skills. Our findings reinforce the importance of providing students with real multidisciplinary team experience for NPD projects and suggest that greater emphasis be given to the teaching and practice of “softer” skills, such as listening, negotiation, empathy, and observation. The research also indicates that more guidance, tools, and frameworks are needed to assist student product developers in the complex task of gathering, managing, and applying user needs.

The potential of new developments in mobile technology, with capabilities for anytime, anywhere wireless access, to affect pre-engineering education and technical literacy at the K-12 level remains poorly understood Mobile access to digital libraries provides unique opportunities for leveraging valuable experiences outside of the classroom. This paper presents a user needs analysis of teachers, students and parents with regard to understanding the potential of such mobile digital library services to enhance science and technology learning in informal environments for students in U.S. grades 4-5 and middle school To study this area we discuss a methodology at the intersection of design and research that borrows from qualitative research methods and traditional user-centered design, together with frameworks for translating qualitative data into concrete user needs. We present a summary of twelve need themes that emerged from the analysis together with recommendations for how these themes inform the development of a mobile digital library infrastructure and its digital learning resources. The recommendations are illustrated on an informal learning scenario intended for a pre-engineering exercise using resources ftom the NEEDS engineering education digital library at www.needs.org.

Members of newly formed design teams have different frames - implicit values, goals and assumptions - each of them hold about what problems are important and how they are best addressed. In the early, informal phases of design projects, these frames, and the degree to which they are shared within the team, have substantial consequences. However, little is known about the interactions and activities that reveal frames and support frame sharing in teams. Our study follows 22 newly-formed multi-disciplinary teams through the early phases of the design process in a New Product Development course. We used a mixed method, interdisciplinary approach to understand the dynamic process through which design frames are socially negotiated and shared. We identified core framing activities of design teams and propose a framing cycle of pseudo-frame setting, making individuals' frames explicit, making frame conflicts salient, and building a common frame.

New Product Development (NPD) classes based around problem-based learning provide an effective vehicle for authentic learning and realistic design experiences. Selfreflection provides one mechanism to expose learning accomplishments to the instructor and help the students develop self-assessment skills for professional practice. As one component of a self-assessment learning process this paper describes a structured ‘lessons learned’ exercise that focuses on what the students themselves found to be the salient learning experiences when engaging in a multidisciplinary product development process. We present an analysis of over 1200 ‘lessons learned’ collected from three years of a graduate multidisciplinary NPD class with students from engineering, information studies, architecture, business and industrial design. Students highlighted skills for working in multidisciplinary teams as their most important learning experience, whereas the area of greatest impact in the NPD process was the gathering and analysis of customer and user needs. By breaking down these sections we draw insights into students' learning experiences and provide implications for design education in terms of skill sets required and recommended course emphases.

This paper reports on research conducted on design teams at UC Berkeley over several years at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The paper provides a triangulation of indicators of successful design teams drawn from different research methods. The research sources include questionnaires, team documents, entail communication, individual design journals, faculty evaluations, and ratings from external design judges. Computational linguistic algorithms are used to analyze the text documents with a focus on latent semantic analysis and semantic coherence. Sketches are analyzed using a comprehensive list of metrics, including Shah's 'variety' measure for quantifying the breadth of the solution space explored during the generation process. A synthesis of the results provides interesting and counterintuitive indicators for predicting the success of student design teams. This analysis, in turn, provides insight into learning how the student design teams negotiate and learn the design process and can assist educators in improving the teaching of design.

Memory Tennis, an enhanced table tennis table, helps players train by collecting statistical information and providing real-time feedback. Researchers expect that other interactive sports could also use the approach. This article is part of a special issue on pervasive computing in sports.

How can table tennis players be sure they're hitting the right spot during training? How can they improve their shot making? And how can they gauge their improvement over time? We are designing and implementing Memory Tennis, an enhanced table tennis practice table that projects a lasting image of the last place the ball struck on the vertical practice wall. Visualizing past impact locations lets players visually gauge their accuracy immediately and actively compensate for poor shots. Additionally, players can get statistics on past performance. The system can project targets for players to hit and act as a coaching program as players' performance improves. Our system involves a table tennis practice table where one-half of the table in the vertical position returns the player's shots. We use a digital projector calibrated with the table's vertical half, a digital video camera, and a vibration detector mounted on the table. When a ball strikes the wall, the vibration detector triggers the camera to photograph the wall. Our system processes the photograph and projects an image of the ball's impact location onto the wall. The system can also project statistics during play. We designed it to be low cost, to minimize setup time, and to maximize portability. We envisage that the system could work for many interactive games and sports, such as regular tennis, darts, and soccer. Figure 1. A table tennis player using a Memory Tennis prototype. The red squares are targets, the blue circles are misses, and the green circles are hits. A vibration detector is in the lower right. This month's Works-In-Progress department presents an interesting project that combines inexpensive sensing and computing components to provide real-time feedback to table tennis players. The system collects statistical information, and the approach used should be extensi-ble to other games and sports. —Anthony D. Joseph

The focus of this work is on the design of a system for informal education in rural, farmworker populations using mobile devices. We have conducted needs assessment with farmworkers in the California Central Valley in conjunction with engineering and industrial design students as part of a service learning initiative. The community, working with the students, identified key needs related to accessing information, emphasizing health and legal rights. We propose the possibility of wireless access to digital libraries for access to this information. We discuss an appropriate system design using mobile phones and future plans for user testing with the community. We stress the importance of continually working with the community to develop relevant and sustainable solutions.

Our system involves a table tennis practice table where one-half of the table in the vertical position returns the player's shots. We use a digital projector calibrated with the table's vertical half, a digital video camera, and a vibration detector mounted on the table. When a ball strikes the wall, the vibration detector triggers the camera to photograph the wall. Our system processes the photograph and projects an image of the ball's impact location onto the wall. The system can also project statistics during play. We designed it to be low cost, to minimize setup time, and to maximize portability. We envisage that the system could work for many interactive games and sports, such as regular tennis, darts, and soccer.

The paper describes the application of systematic innovation methods within the industrial and process engineering arena. Central to the successful application of these methods is the recognition of the importance of challenging the trade-offs and compromises that continuously hamper improvements to systems. The paper presents a list of the known strategies for challenging such trade-offs in ways that result in win-win solutions. The basis for the findings is the analysis of over two million successful innovations from across all fields of human endeavour. In addition to presenting examples of each of the win-win strategies, the paper provides case study examples showing how the method is being deployed in real life process engineering and implementation situations.