INTERNET DESIGN STUDIO

摘要

In most instances engineering design courses are offered during the senior year of the undergraduate curriculum. These senior level design courses allow the students to apply different engineering concepts to design a product, with the expectation of preparing engineering students for a distributed and global workplace. Another possible alternative is to provide a simulated education environment where students can design products in a distributed and collaborative environment. The use of Internet in education has opened the possibility to explore and adopt new approaches to teach distributed collaborative engineering design and analysis. The Internet Design Studio, presented in this paper, tries to fulfill this need. In the Internet Design Studio each student is provided with a virtual design studio space for each project. The design studio spaces can be imagined as a virtual space containing design tools, applications, software and theoretical materials that facilitates students to design and perform analysis. Conceptually, a student enters the studio space and grabs appropriate tools to perform different design tasks. The design tools in the Internet Design Studio are web-based and support collaborations by allowing multiple users to view, discuss, create and utilize same models of the product to perform analysis. In this paper the framework of the Internet Design Studio is presented. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated through the use of several multi-designer collaborative design tools.