Research

I am interested in researching the relationships between energy systems and product design. Specifically, I am concerned with the environmental impacts of energy production and delivery, both renewable energy and fossil fuel energy. I am currently developing mathematical models of the electrical grid and its dispatching mechanisms. In doing so we can better understand the emissions that are associated with electricity use. I use these models to examine the impacts of renewable electricity in a geographic context. Energy is intimately linked to product design through a product's manufacturing, use and disposal phases. I am currently using my electrical dispatching model along with models of plugin hybrid electric vehicles to analyze their impact on carbon dioxide emissions.

I will further use this model not simply for analysis, but also for product design purposes, by incorporating it within a design optimization framework.

Understanding and incorporating aesthetic preference within product design presents many potential problems to the engineer and designer. First, the culture of design has typically used qualitative tools to generate an understaning of aestethetic preference. This is not to say that qualitative tools are useful, but they fail to capture human preference in a mathematical sense, which is useful to engineers. Further, the goal of the aesthetic has almost universally been submitted to the skills of the industrial designer to divine the wants of users. This relies too heavily on intuition. Finally, current practice fails to link the interplay between Form and Funtion in a mathematical way.

With this work we seek to understand and describe product specific shape preference in a quantitative manner. Using this information we will incorporate engineering models that are affected by the same variables that affect shape preference and we will explore the tradeoffs between shape, Form, and engineering, Function.