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Influence of method and media interventions in creative remote design team collaboration
Domingo, Lawrence[Stanford, California] : [Stanford University], 2023.Design collaboration traditionally happens in person in the context of shared physical workspaces. The development of the Internet and collaborative communication platforms enable remote or distributed collaboration that can span across the globe. The growing ubiquity of remote work culture has impacted knowledge work, education, and design team collaboration. Remote collaboration has brought about benefits such as greater flexibility and autonomy in how employees spend their time and greater diversity of perspectives by collaborating across the globe. However, remote work also brings challenges to communication including challenges in building a shared vision and changes in behavioral communication. As collaborative computing technology evolves, so do user behaviors and team behaviors. Advances in bandwidth and hardware enable more natural conversations. Collaborative hardware such as virtual presence rooms or telepresence robots that enable remote communication can often be large and expensive which can be appropriate for corporate use but less appropriate for distributed individuals who require more accessible and less cumbersome technologies. This work builds upon the long history of the Center for Design Research (CDR) on design team collaboration, and in particular, gesturing, ideation, language evolution, remote collaborative tools, team diversity, interaction and communication, sketching and prototyping, digital capture, team dynamics, and conflict \& emotion and applies those findings and design implications to the individually distributed remote design team context. The research presented in this thesis asked: How does designer behavior change in the remote context? How can design process methods and media tools such as Brainstorming, Five-Whys, 2D media, and 3D media facilitate remote creative design team behavior?To understand remote design team creative collaboration, two online design studies were conducted looking at the influences design process methods and media tools had on team behavior. A Five-Why design process method interventions had positive impacts in aligning team conversation and the Brainstorming design process method helped reduce interruption for distributed design teams which both facilitate collaborative communication. The presence of 3D media for remote expert design pairs helped facilitate the occurrence of non-verbal expression through gestural activity which is associated with high creative design team performance. These findings can help to provide feedback and guidance to improve remote team collaboration, inform tool development to diagnose and facilitate remote team behavior, and provide insight for educating novice designers learning how to collaborate remotely. The research presented in this dissertation contributes to our understanding of creative remote design teams collaborating through the use of process method or media interventions that historically report improvements in team performance when used in traditional in-person design teams. These findings have implications for for improving pedagogy and lesson planning in engineering education, tighter coordination in teamwork, providing insight into common breakdowns to support new communication tool development, and indications for new ideation tools for creative hybrid work.
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Injecting a Force of Disruption into the Pharmaceutical Market
Barnard, NathanielJune 14, 2023; 2023The pharmaceutical industry is experiencing a shift from daily tablet regimens to long-acting medications that can be injected monthly allowing patients to spend less time actively treating their disease, bettering patient mental health. The barrier to development of long-acting injectable medications is the high drug concentration required, which results in highly viscous medications that are difficult to administer in standard syringes. In this report, we describe the invention of a device that enables clinicians to inject highly viscous fluids through 3ml syringes with standard needles to aid clinical evaluation of long-acting injectable drugs. Our device works via a mechanism similar to that of a caulk gun: the user squeezes the handle and a cam-lock lever amplifies this force, which then pushes a drive rod onto the syringe plunger. The drive rod runs through a tab connected to the output of the handle, and the tab can rotate about the handle. The rotation causes the drive tab to put force on the drive rod when the user actuates the handle. This system ensured that the device passed our high priority requirement to require less than 53N of force to inject the medication, requiring only 33.6N of force to actuate during testing. The device will allow clinicians to inject 300cP medication from a standard 3ml syringe through multiple actuations of the device. This work represents a vital stepping stone to help reduce the time to develop long-acting injectables by enabling manual injection of these high-viscosity medications without the need for additional development of autoinjectors for patient testing. Our prototype meets Gilead's initial specification, but to facilitate use in clinical settings, manufacturing the device in a sterilizable material, and redesigning a simpler cover for the syringe would be a priority.
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Automatic Flux Chamber for the Monitoring of Carbon Dioxide and Methane Emissions from Peatlands
Zhen, RaymondApril 2, 2023; 2023Peatlands are a type of wetlands that act as a carbon sink to prevent dead plant material from biodegrading and releasing carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Peatlands are currently being destroyed for the production of palm oil and other agricultural products, which releases greenhouse gases, that were previously confined underwater, into the atmosphere; these agricultural practices contribute to potentially catastrophic global warming events. Climate researchers seek to understand such impacts by collecting data on greenhouse gases that are released from Indonesian peatlands. However, current modes of collecting peatland emissions data are inadequate because they are expensive, non-portable, and not long-lasting. We seek to address these issues through the design and production of a floating greenhouse gas flux chamber that collects data from the water surface of peatlands. Thus, we created PEAT, the Peatlands Environmental Assessment Tool, which floats on a body of water, traps gases emitted from the surface, collects data on gas concentrations, and releases the gases in a continuous cycle. Our chamber integrates a methane and carbon dioxide sensor on a printed circuit board. PEAT is protected from humid environments, uses an actuated linear sliding door for venting, floats using a foam ring, can be easily tethered to a stationary object, and can collect data autonomously for one month before any maintenance is required. We conducted the following tests on PEAT: a flotation test that verified its ability to stabilize itself under rainy and windy conditions, a sealing test that verified the device can trap gases, a venting test that verified the device can reset greenhouse gas concentrations to ambient conditions, and desiccant lifespan test to ensure that the electronics will be kept at a safe humidity for the duration of autonomous data collection. The implication of PEAT’s robust design is a long-lasting, low-cost, and portable solution that supports the research of greenhouse gas emissions and can impact climate regulations.
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