Design Studio of the Future

Bill Mitchell and John R. Williams

The Design Studio of the Future seeks to create a technological and cultural environment for exporing new design paradigms. In particular we want to understand how the human can take advantage of new telecommunications, computational and information processing technologies to do better design.

The key component which the Design Studio of the Future brings to the table is the ability to test out products and processes in a large scale design environment. We believe that scale is a critical issue often not addressed when prototyping new products.

Within the Studio we run design projects involving upwards of 150 students each term. These students allow us to test out our research ideas very quickly in a realistic environment which is more flexible than industry but which retains a grounding in the real design process.

The Design Studio already has real time design collaboration with five U.S. universities (ARPA TRP Realization Consortium, ECSEL Coalition) and several companies.

Our projects center on the following aspects of technology.

Physical simulation in synthetic environments. These include fast physics for multi-body dynamics for reasoning about manufacturability.
Web based knowledge systems and collaborative environments.