Design Gateway: Pedagogical Discussion of a Second-Year Industrial Design Studio

This presentation was part of the session : Pedagogy: Procedures, Scaffolds, Strategies, Tactics24th National Conference on the Beginning Design StudentMost industrial design programs focus the beginning design curriculum on the learning of core design principles. These core principles are seen as not specific to any one discipline (architecture, industrial design, interior design, etc.), but rather as fundamentals germane to all design fields. These core principles focus on the analysis of built artifact (structures, products, systems) to develop an understanding of geometry, structure and composition through looking and exploring. Students develop skills in representing, communicating and analyzing what they see and experience. These skills are nurtured in early studios. As students move into later studios, more discipline-specific knowledge and skills are integrated into their educational pedagogy. In the beginning years of design education, there is a transition from the learning of general 'core' design fundamentals to specialized principles that is inherent to their specific disciplines. As students move from abstract ideas to 'real-world' projects, they seem to have difficulty transitioning between the abstract concepts they previously learned and reality that requires application to new settings [1]. Students perceive learned concepts as specific to a particular studio project, rather than realize that design education is a continuum of practiced principles [1]. This presents a disconnect between knowledge transfer from one studio project to the next. The curriculum of the second-year industrial design studio at the Georgia Institute of Technology is designed to address this disconnect and help students successfully transition from the core design fundamentals to industrial design knowledge. Throughout the second year education, students engage in the making and communication of form and they do it through design exercises dealing with the fundamentals as well as knowledge base, both simultaneously and repeatedly, According to ----, a design education that offers a component of repetitive experience encourages students to be cognizant of the iterative nature of both the design process as well as design education [2]. This paper discusses the approach, designed by the authors, evident in the sophomore-year industrial design curriculum at Georgia Tech. While emphasis is placed on rigor, exploration and articulation of concepts throughout the studio period, this approach adopts a pedagogy based on a series of modules that scaffold the introduction of new concepts with the reinforcement of previously learned ones. Individual modules follow a path of concept introduction (lecture), analysis, practice, and finally refinement. Upon completion of several modules, students engage in a 'module project' which demonstrates synthesis and realization of the learned concepts. A final semester-end design project provides for aggregation and demonstration of all subject matter learned throughout the semester. This pedagogical approach bridges the gap of disconnect between previous studios and promotes a continuous layering and practice of beginning design fundamentals

Exploration through drawings in the conceptual stages of product design

This paper argues that sequences of exploratory drawings - constructed by designer's movements and decisions - trace systematic and logical paths from ideas to designs. This argument has three parts. First, sequences of exploratory sketches produced by product designers, against the same task specification, are analyzed in terms of the cognitive categories of reinterpretation, emergence and abstraction. Second, a computational model is outlined for the process of exploration through drawing and third the model is applied to elucidate the logic in the sequences of exploratory sketches examined earlier

Model checking embedded system designs

We survey the basic principles behind the application of model checking to controller verification and synthesis. A promising development is the area of guided model checking, in which the state space search strategy of the model checking algorithm can be influenced to visit more interesting sets of states first. In particular, we discuss how model checking can be combined with heuristic cost functions to guide search strategies. Finally, we list a number of current research developments, especially in the area of reachability analysis for optimal control and related issues

Software Model Checking with Explicit Scheduler and Symbolic Threads

In many practical application domains, the software is organized into a set of threads, whose activation is exclusive and controlled by a cooperative scheduling policy: threads execute, without any interruption, until they either terminate or yield the control explicitly to the scheduler. The formal verification of such software poses significant challenges. On the one side, each thread may have infinite state space, and might call for abstraction. On the other side, the scheduling policy is often important for correctness, and an approach based on abstracting the scheduler may result in loss of precision and false positives. Unfortunately, the translation of the problem into a purely sequential software model checking problem turns out to be highly inefficient for the available technologies. We propose a software model checking technique that exploits the intrinsic structure of these programs. Each thread is translated into a separate sequential program and explored symbolically with lazy abstraction, while the overall verification is orchestrated by the direct execution of the scheduler. The approach is optimized by filtering the exploration of the scheduler with the integration of partial-order reduction. The technique, called ESST (Explicit Scheduler, Symbolic Threads) has been implemented and experimentally evaluated on a significant set of benchmarks. The results demonstrate that ESST technique is way more effective than software model checking applied to the sequentialized programs, and that partial-order reduction can lead to further performance improvements.Comment: 40 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in journal of logical methods in computer scienc

Towards the Model-Driven Engineering of Secure yet Safe Embedded Systems

We introduce SysML-Sec, a SysML-based Model-Driven Engineering environment aimed at fostering the collaboration between system designers and security experts at all methodological stages of the development of an embedded system. A central issue in the design of an embedded system is the definition of the hardware/software partitioning of the architecture of the system, which should take place as early as possible. SysML-Sec aims to extend the relevance of this analysis through the integration of security requirements and threats. In particular, we propose an agile methodology whose aim is to assess early on the impact of the security requirements and of the security mechanisms designed to satisfy them over the safety of the system. Security concerns are captured in a component-centric manner through existing SysML diagrams with only minimal extensions. After the requirements captured are derived into security and cryptographic mechanisms, security properties can be formally verified over this design. To perform the latter, model transformation techniques are implemented in the SysML-Sec toolchain in order to derive a ProVerif specification from the SysML models. An automotive firmware flashing procedure serves as a guiding example throughout our presentation.Comment: In Proceedings GraMSec 2014, arXiv:1404.163

Towards Symbolic Model-Based Mutation Testing: Combining Reachability and Refinement Checking

Model-based mutation testing uses altered test models to derive test cases that are able to reveal whether a modelled fault has been implemented. This requires conformance checking between the original and the mutated model. This paper presents an approach for symbolic conformance checking of action systems, which are well-suited to specify reactive systems. We also consider nondeterminism in our models. Hence, we do not check for equivalence, but for refinement. We encode the transition relation as well as the conformance relation as a constraint satisfaction problem and use a constraint solver in our reachability and refinement checking algorithms. Explicit conformance checking techniques often face state space explosion. First experimental evaluations show that our approach has potential to outperform explicit conformance checkers.Comment: In Proceedings MBT 2012, arXiv:1202.582

Design reuse research : a computational perspective

This paper gives an overview of some computer based systems that focus on supporting engineering design reuse. Design reuse is considered here to reflect the utilisation of any knowledge gained from a design activity and not just past designs of artefacts. A design reuse process model, containing three main processes and six knowledge components, is used as a basis to identify the main areas of contribution from the systems. From this it can be concluded that while reuse libraries and design by reuse has received most attention, design for reuse, domain exploration and five of the other knowledge components lack research effort