Energy efficiency has recently come to the forefront of energy debates, especially in the state of California. This focus on efficiency has been driven by the deregulation of electrical-energy distribution, the increasing price of electricity, and the implementation of rolling blackouts. Currently, buildings consume over 1/3 of primary energy, and 2/3 of all electricity produced in the U.S. Commercial buildings consume roughly half of this, and lighting is responsible for approximately 40% of commercial building energy use. These numbers indicate that research in lighting efficiency has great potential to positively impact energy efficiency.

Efficient lighting controls proven to save up to 45% in electricity consumption are commercially available. In practice however, these systems are poorly received and greatly under-leveraged, resulting in a missed opportunity for impressive energy savings. Accordingly, we proposed the three-phase extension of an intelligent decision framework that addresses two major shortcomings of today’s energy-efficient lighting controls – user satisfaction, and lost energy savings stemming from naïve decision algorithms. The first phase of research was directed at enhancement of an existing preference-balancing control algorithm, in order that it accommodate demand-responsive control as well as the desires of the building manager. The second phase was devoted to identifying user preferences through empirical occupant testing. In the third phase, the resulting algorithms were simulated and evaluated.

Several facilities managers were interviewed and surveyed in order to identify appropriate variables and control policies to represent their desires within the decision algorithm. The preferred demand response strategy was found to be specific to the particular manager. Across all managers, energy was the most commonly selected indicator of the quality of lighting decisions. Automated occupant preference testing was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of collecting such data in office environments, and to provide realistic occupant perceptions for use in simulation.

Simulated results indicate that the intelligent decision algorithm and framework present a promising control paradigm, and should be further expanded for the explicit inclusion of solar variables. Preliminary assessment showed that energy pricing can be factored into the control algorithm without significantly compromising occupant perceptions of lighting quality. Further energy savings are garnered by curtailing consumption during times of elevated pricing. Provided that curtailment is implemented with a slow enough dimming rate, reductions of up to 30% in illuminance are detected by roughly half of all occupants. Leveraging this research, the intelligent controller implements the specific demand response policy chosen by the facilities manager.

What do product design teams value in sustainable design methods? Specifically, what kinds of activities and mindsets comprise different design methods, and which ones do design teams believe drive sustainability, innovation, and other value? How could they be combined to improve sustainable design’s value to companies? This study was the first to deconstruct green product design practices into their constituent activities and mindsets to characterize them and hypothesize their potential synergies. It was also the first to empirically test and compare what practitioners value within three of these sustainable design practices—The Natural Step, Whole System Mapping, and Biomimicry.

Others have identified mindsets in sustainable design practices, or have identified activities in general engineering design practices, but none have done both for sustainable design practices. Such analysis is important, because most designers do not follow design methods like tunnels of process to pass through completely, but like toolboxes to draw from opportunistically. Here, fourteen design methods, guides, and certifications were deconstructed to categorize their component activities and mindsets, and hypothesize what designers, engineers, and managers would consider useful tools to select for different purposes, or could combine to multiply their value. It also hypothesized some green design methods might be preferred by designers, while others might be preferred by engineers or managers.

Empirical testing of the activities and mindsets within The Natural Step, Whole System Mapping, and Biomimicry measured their value for general purposes, sustainability, and innovation. It did so by providing 29 workshops on these design methods to 520 participants, with 376 survey respondents: 172 professionals from over 30 different companies and 204 Berkeley students, totaling 1,432 pre- and post-workshop survey responses, due to many people participating in multiple workshops. This testing of multiple design methods was new because most literature on sustainable product design either treats all sustainable design the same, or proposes a specific new design method and studies it. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of survey results validated the earlier deconstruction and found “golden tools” in each design method: In The Natural Step, Backcasting was most valued, largely for its strategic benefit of focusing thought to accomplish goals, and providing a new lens. In Whole System Mapping,

Draw System Map was most valued, largely for broadening scope, visually showing the larger system, and aiding collaboration. In Biomimicry, Nature as Mentor was highly valued as a new lens to approach problems, and for being inspiring; AskNature.org was greatly valued for providing new ideas and for being interesting / engaging. Some of these and other components of the design methods were valued for sustainability, innovation, or both, and some for neither. Results were broken down by demographics (job role, company type, company size, industry sector, and gender) to see if different groups valued different things, as hypothesized above. However, differences were generally too small to be statistically significant at these sample sizes, which implies that sustainable design methods can be taught and used universally between all these groups, even though individuals vary in what they most value and why.

In addition to these theoretical analyses and empirical tests, 42 professional designers, engineers, and managers were interviewed at the beginning and end of the study to help establish background context for the research, recommend what green design methods to analyze, validate survey responses, and test for longer-term impact of workshops. They valued a wide range of design practices for several different reasons; some design practices were valued for both sustainability and innovation. Differences in responses from sustainable design experts versus traditional design practitioners showed how specialized skills help sustainable design; this implied design teams should not merely use standard design practices while thinking green thoughts. Multiple respondents mentioned the value of combining green design practices with both each other and traditional design practices. The interviews also investigated how design professionals measure innovation, though they were surprisingly resistant to the idea of quantifying it. Interviews also investigated who can best lead sustainability in design teams, why sustainability might provide business value, and how adoption of sustainability might best be driven in design teams.

This study’s results should help designers, engineers, product managers, and others who create our material world to practice sustainable design more effectively. It can help practitioners mindfully choose and combine golden tools from various green design toolboxes to build a better world while building business value.

Both inside corporations and in self-organized online communities, globally distributed groups of thousands of people now collaborate together on design projects over the Internet. This changes the nature of product design, creating potential for new levels of innovation and product development speed\textemdash for example, developing vehicle designs in less than four months, or implementing new business models for urban revitalization in less than a year. However, the plethora of information created by these communities comes with a price: individuals cannot process all of it in a reasonable time frame. Without a means of harnessing their collective efforts, collaborative design communities can never reach their full potential as engines of design innovation and development. To address this problem, this dissertation applies techniques from data science and machine learning to % understand how designers can more effectively navigate and use this vast quantity of information in

answer to the following central question:

How can online design communities effectively use the design data they generate to help manage their operations and improve their designs?

Specifically, it presents examples around particular design communities (OpenIDEO and HCD Connect), and some of the challenges they face: How do you maintain a sustainable and creative design community without centralized command? How do designers locate the most relevant or creative inspirations out of thousands of ideas? How do novice designers use the community to learn what design methods are appropriate for a given problem? How can you scaffold novice designers within a community so that they can meaningfully contribute without requiring full expert knowledge? By framing these real-world problems through the lens of Network Analysis, the Maximum Coverage Problem, and Recommender Systems, this dissertation demonstrates how modern machine learning techniques can ameliorate the issues community members face in practice.

From an computational perspective, it finds that the complexity of solving many distributed design tasks necessitates not only looking at a design itself, but also how it is situated in a human community; human relationships play as big a part in predicting a design's success as the content of the design itself. From a human perspective, data-assisted techniques can adapt to human behavior in ways that improve the collaborative structure of large teams, the relevance of methods used for design problems, and the number and variety of ideas that need to be explored by a designer.

The dissertation's findings imply that customizing data science techniques to take advantage of the socially embedded nature of design benefits designers and scientists alike, not only by making design teams more effective but also by providing deeper insight into how humans design the way they do. They point to a future where data-driven design tools are not just a means to an end, but a critical part of how we understand our own needs and creations; where science can be applied, not just to the creation, but to the process of creation.

Modern emergency response operations increasingly use remote ground-based sensors to provide real-time situational awareness for first responders. However, human users often must personally enter a dangerous situation to place the sensors. The seamless deployment of such sensors without human intervention allows for faster, wider distribution at minimal risk to human lives. This work presents a systematic approach to the design of impact-resistant tensegrity landers capable of autonomous high-altitude aerial deployment of critical sensor payloads in disaster scenarios.

Tensegrity structures are derived from the concept of “tensile integrity” and are composed of rigid rods suspended by elastic cables in a tension network. Their lightweight and flexible properties protect the sensor payload from landing impacts at high velocities. Design equations and simulation models are first used to inform the hardware design of the tensegrity structure and provide upper-bound estimates of viable tensegrity lander designs. A comprehensive range of drop test experiments are conducted to validate the impact behavior and demonstrate the impact-resistance in the highest-altitude drop test experiments of tensegrity landers to date. The experimental results are leveraged to propose empirical scaling laws for the rapid and efficient design of future generations of tensegrity landers. Furthermore, two new tensegrity lander designs, an asymmetrically-weighted structure and a badminton-inspired structure, augment the tensegrity with self-stabilizing functionality to control for the landing orientation of optimal impact mitigation as indicated by the drop test experiment data. The results reveal further opportunities to optimize the design of the structure by aligning the stiffness of the structure with the desired landing orientation. Such a tailored structure can have motorized cables decoupled from the impact event that can then be used to provide locomotion for an ideal hybrid lander-rover tensegrity system.

Overall, the work contributes design methods, reorientation capabilities, and validated hardware prototypes to the grand challenge of tensegrity robotics: demonstrating a fully autonomous tensegrity robot capable of safely navigating through unstructured terrain.

Mycelium materials are made of fungi. By digesting waste to create a bio-composite of mycelium and the feedstock, they are becoming a sustainable material option. Fungi are nature’s recyclers, with millions of species that can digest everything from cellulose to polymers. By selecting specific species to digest industrial waste such as sawdust, bio-composites can be grown that can be disposed of after use by composting. Composting reduces their environmental impact in comparison to synthetic composites. As part of an academic-industry collaboration, bio-composites were explored made of Ganoderma lucidum fungi. The findings provide researchers and commercial developers with information on the properties, performance and suitable applications of these novel materials. The material was characterized from a physical, mechanical, thermal, and manufacturing standpoint using American Society of Testing and Materials standards.

The ultimate tensile strength was 176 kPa, with a tensile modulus of 1.3 MPa, and an ultimate compressive strength of 490 kPa. These properties are comparable to brittle, cellular materials such as expanded polymer foams. The values for the thermal resistance and thermal conductivity ranged from 0.0014 to 0.0019 m2 K/W and 0.053 to 0.077 W/m K respectively, which are comparable to current natural insulator materials such as balsa wood and natural cork. The average maximum use temperature was found to be 390 ºC (734ºF). These properties are comparable to polymer foams such as expanded polystyrene foam, suiting the material to non-structural applications such as packaging and insulation. Combining a mycelium material core with carbon fiber and bamboo laminate skins improved the flexural strength. The core shear ultimate stress was 36.2 kPa for the mycelium material alone, rising to 63.3 kPa with bamboo skins and 76.6 kPa with carbon fiber skins. The large improvement in strength suggests that with development mycelium materials could be suited to higher-performance applications such as interior wall panels and construction bricks. Methods were tested to manufacture mycelium materials, finding the material could be shaped with drilling, milling, sanding, and that laser cutting can form features of ~3mm.

Finally, current and future applications were considered using three use case studies: as packaging, as fabrics, and as a sanitation solution to digest human waste to create useful products. Overall, mycelium materials show great promise for further development as a bio-composite that can digest waste to create useful materials.

In the social sector, programs often fail due to a lack of understanding of the norms, knowledge, and needs of the people who execute and benefit from the solutions offered by those programs. Human-Centered Design (HCD) offers a broadly-applicable problem-solving framework and methods for developing an in-depth understanding of people who are directly impacted by development challenges, generating creative ideas, and rapidly learning from small-scale pilots.

As HCD is an emerging practice in the social sector, a critical first step is an exploratory case study. Using the Social Blueprint framework, I characterized two drastically different approaches for teaching and practicing HCD for Social Impact. IDEO.org’s Fellowship program represents a Project-Based Consulting Model in which professional design teams partner with social enterprises, nonprofits, and foundations to design and implement scalable products and services. During the one-year Fellowship program, social sector leaders learn HCD by working on design consulting projects with experienced designers. The International Development Design Summit (IDDS) program represents a Creative Capacity Building Model, in which students and members of low-income communities learn to design appropriate technologies and launch social enterprises. IDDS is an educational conference that aims to put participants on a lifelong path dedicated to social innovation.

These exploratory case studies consist of a qualitative analysis of documents, participant observations, and key informant interviews. All the key informants were employees or volunteers previously or currently working with the organizations in this research study. By analyzing the evolution of IDEO.org from 2011 to 2015 and of IDDS from 2007 to 2015, I identified challenges associated with trying to achieve impact through the dual goals of design education and practice. IDEO.org addressed these challenges by developing programs with distinct missions focused on either goal. IDDS maintained its multifaceted mission, and developed a Social Innovation Ecosystem of complementary programs and resources to better support its dual goals.

The literature on strategic fit suggests that all building blocks of an organization’s or program’s social blueprints must be aligned to achieve its mission or anchor purpose. Despite their shared emphasis on the HCD process, IDEO.org’s Fellowship program and IDDS program produced outcomes that aligned with their respective social blueprint building blocks. My comparison of IDEO.org’s and IDDS’s design processes also suggests that the HCD process is not a static process, but rather is heavily influenced by organizational and project contexts. I developed in-depth case studies of an IDEO.org project and an IDDS project to illustrate the differences in their approaches and identify factors that may influence the progression of projects from the design stage to the pilot stage.

HCD has great potential for generating innovative solutions to address challenges of poverty. This dissertation builds a foundation for understanding how to better design for social impact by examining the experience of two renowned pioneering organizations.

While product and technology roadmaps have been well formalized in terms of their structures, methodologies, and frameworks, design roadmaps have not been explicitly explored nor studied from either an academic or industry practice standpoint. With increasing uncertainty, rapid change, and complexity in market environments, companies are finding that they can no longer differentiate their products and services by relying on traditional roadmapping processes that focus solely on technologies and product features. Rather, strategies that revolve around the holistic experience provided by a product or service are more likely to be successful in today’s market. This dissertation introduces a formalized design roadmapping framework to guide product planning in today’s more user-centered marketplace.

Initial exploratory research assessed the current application of roadmapping in industry through observations and semi-structured interviews of product managers, technology managers, and designers from Silicon Valley and East Coast companies. This descriptive study revealed key challenges and opportunities associated with current roadmapping processes, providing a solid foundation on which to create a more effective process.

I introduce and characterize a detailed framework for design roadmapping that focuses on desired outcomes for the user and not just product features nor technologies. It provides a mechanism to explicitly integrate customer/user research into the roadmapping process and use this research to consider appropriate projected technology choices. Similar to traditional product and technology roadmaps, the design roadmapping process presented herein aggregates design experience elements along a timeline by associating key user needs with products, services, or systems.

The design roadmap framework was tested through active research in a large multinational corporation and a small startup, and was applied to new product development curricula at UC Berkeley. In all settings, participants found the new framework beneficial at multiple stages of the new product development process. The activities associated with design roadmapping process were also considered particularly helpful for prioritizing products for commercialization and promoting a shared vision among team members and active communication across organizations.

Our world faces immense challenges in global health and equity. There continue to be huge disparities in access to health care across geographies, despite the massive strides that have been made to address health issues. In this dissertation, I explore the role of human-centered design to improve global health access and reduce disparities. Human-centered design, a cross-disciplinary creative problem-solving approach, has been applied and studied in both academic research and practice, but its role in improving global health access remains poorly understood.

In this dissertation, I present research on designing for health accessibility in the context of one particular disease: cervical cancer. Every year, 300,000 women around the world die of cervical cancer and ninety percent of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. Cervical cancer is an illustrative example of the global disparities in access to health care, given that cervical cancer is preventable and the majority of global cervical cancer mortality is in low- and middle-income countries.

My research examines the work of two organizations that created unique solutions to improve access to cervical cancer screening in India and Nicaragua. I develop case studies of each organization grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, including over 250 hours of observation and 15 interviews over two years. Through these case studies, I show how early efforts to understand the barriers inhibiting cervical cancer screening access allow design practitioners to create novel and feasible ways to address these barriers. This demonstrates the importance of design practitioners considering multiple dimensions of accessibility, including availability, physical accessibility, accommodation, affordability, and acceptability, while conducting design research in order to improve the potential impact of their ideas and prototypes. Overall, this dissertation establishes the foundation of a new paradigm to “design for accessibility” that can inspire further application and research across sectors to address the many social equity and accessibility challenges facing our world.

This dissertation studies novel robotic systems based on tensegrity structures, with an emphasis on their locomotion capabilities. Naturally compliant tensegrity structures have several unique properties that are advantageous for co-robotic or soft robotic platforms; they are lightweight, deployable, robust, and safe. By leveraging these distinctive features of tensegrity structures, tensegrity robots are expected to overcome the barriers for today's robots. In this regard, tensegrity robots have been envisioned for a wide range of new applications that have not been explored before, including assistive and rehabilitative healthcare, search and rescue, and planetary space exploration, to name a few. In order to be actually deployed for these applications, tensegrity robots should have mobility in the rst place. For this reason, two modes of locomotion are examined for spherical tensegrity robots in this research: rolling and hopping.

This research begins by presenting four hardware prototypes of spherical tensegrity robots that have been constructed at the Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities laboratory. Three of them (named TT-1, TT-2, and TT-3) are based on a six-rod tensegrity structure, and the last one (named T12-R) is based on a twelve-rod tensegrity structure. A six-rod tensegrity structure is the simplest three-dimensional tensegrity structure that has an outer shape similar to a sphere, and for this reason, the structure is chosen as a basis for the rst three robots. However, the rolling speed of the TT-series robots is limited because their outer surfaces consist only of triangles, which forces them to move in a zig-zag way and lose their momentum as they do so. This motivated the development of T12-R whose outer surface consists of mostly rectangles. This geometry enables the robot to move in a straight line, and thus prevents the loss of momentum. The hardware designs of all four prototypes are described in details.

A spherical tensegrity robot rolls by deforming its shape and by shifting its center of mass. The study of tensegrity deformation, however, is not trivial and poses a unique problem because kinematics and statics of tensegrity structures are tightly coupled and need to be considered concurrently. This work develops two systematic ways of obtaining desirable deformations of spherical tensegrity robots for rolling. As a first step to both approaches, a condition on the center of mass of a spherical tensegrity robot that must be satised for the desirable deformations is stated. The first approach relies on a greedy search algorithm, and it quickly finds one deformation satisfying the condition. This algorithm was implemented in the NASA Tensegrity Robotics Toolkit simulator and the outcome of the simulation was tested on TT-1 and TT-2. Our hardware experiments show that the robots can realize a piecewise continuous rolling motion with the deformations found in the simulation. However, it was also observed that the robots occasionally fail to roll because the algorithm did not take reliability of the rolling motion into account when searching for the desired deformations.

To overcome this drawback, the second approach that combines a dynamic relaxation

technique with a multi-generation Monte Carlo is proposed. It is known in the literature

that the dynamic relaxation is well suited for solving for the deformation of tensegrity structures under non-uniform internal tension distributions. This work adapts the technique to nd the deformations of the hardware robots, but with an explicit description of the rod constraint forces such that the convergence property of the technique is improved. The multi-generation Monte Carlo is then used to find a set of good deformations for reliable rolling by sampling and evaluating a number of deformed shapes through the dynamic relaxation. This procedure is simulated by using a custom-written software in MATLAB, and the results of the simulation as well as their validation on TT-2 are discussed in details. Furthermore, this latter approach is not limited to six-rod tensegrity robots only, and its generalization to other spherical tensegrity robots is presented and demonstrated with T12-R.

Hopping is another viable option for the locomotion of tensegrity robots as they can survive from significant impact shocks due to their structural compliance, while protecting the payloads they are carrying. This contrasts to many other rigid robots that are likely to break if they are dropped from a large height. Hopping could be especially useful when tensegrity robots are deployed for planetary exploration missions because it allows the robots to quickly travel long distances and to be less affected by ground conditions that are potentially unknown. To enable hopping, a tensegrity robot with a cold-gas thruster system is studied and its motion is simulated in this work. The simulation study of different hopping profiles on the Moon shows that longer hops are more energy-efficient but are subject to higher impulse at landing, which may lead to damaging the robot. Hence there is a trade-off between energy-efficiency and safety of the robot. This work also presents a path planning algorithm that is based on the A-star search algorithm, and it combines hopping and rolling for economical navigation on the lunar surface. A localization method based on height measurements of surroundings is also discussed.

Another observation from the simulation study is that a thrust vectoring mechanism is

necessary to increase the fuel efficiency of the thruster-based tensegrity robot. This work

introduces four mechanisms that could be used for this purpose, and among them, a system with two reaction wheels is extensively studied. A spin-axis stabilization problem of the reaction wheel system is formally posed, and the controller that orients the thrust to an arbitrary direction is developed. For this, the (z,w)-parameterization is used to describe the rotational kinematics of the thruster system, but this work modifies the parameterization to explicitly include the target orientation. Based on this description of rotational kinematics, the controller is designed by using the Lyapunov's direct method in conjunction with LaSalle's invariance principle. This controller is globally and asymptotically stable and the proof is given. The controller is simulated on an example thruster system and the results are provided.

The evolving engineering work environment requires engineers to have practical ingenuity, creativity, communication skills, high ethical standards, a strong sense of professionalism, leadership, business and management skills, in addition to technical engineering skills and knowledge. Surveys of new engineering graduate employers and recent engineering alumni both confirm these professional skills as the most important skills required for current engineering jobs. However, employers report a capability gap exists between expected competencies and the competencies of recent engineering graduates. Studies have shown that experiential learning opportunities, such as Project-Based Learning (PBL) and Project-Based Service-Learning (PBSL), promote the development of such professional skills. While PBSL opportunities integrated into undergraduate curriculum has been more widely investigated, the integration of PBSL opportunities in graduate education hasn’t been as extensively explored.

Engineering design pedagogy has increasingly integrated PBSL across the curriculum for its promise of greater engagement of students, transfer of desirable skills, and improved student retention and persistence in STEM. This research evaluates three years of a project-based engineering design course integrating a core PBSL element (social-impact driven projects), representing 70 participants and 17 projects. Using a mixed-methods qualitative approach to ascertain student motivation, goals, and perceived value at four junctures before, during, immediately after, and one to three years after the PBSL experience, this research investigates how student motivation for engaging in PBSL aligns with the actual perceived value that students derive from PBSL experiences. With a diverse student population (46% male, 54% female; 59% engineering, 41% non-engineering), and large graduate student population (76% graduate, 24% undergraduate), this study provided a unique comparison to the existing PBSL literature, which has predominately focused on undergraduate students to date.

Comparing students’ desired outcomes—motivations (n=70 course applications) and goals (n=209 goal statements)—to their self-reported achieved/valued outcomes—perceived value (n=68 reflections) and longitudinal perceived value (n=12 interviews—this research suggests that many students have a mismatch of value expectations from the course. More specifically, students are drawn to the social impact driven, project-based design course by the desire to solve problems but leave appreciating the process of design and problem solving. Approximately 88% of students reported the application/development of design skills/processes as a valued outcome of the course. The most cited design skills/processes were research, interviewing and data collection skills and problem framing and reframing, 60% and 54%, respectively. In post-course interviews, 100% of the 12 students interviewed referenced design skills/processes as a valuable outcome of the course.

Additionally, students valued gaining career clarity—confirmation of pre-existing career paths, identification of new career paths, or a realization that a potential career path isn’t of interest to pursue—all of which are valuable insights for students’ regarding their future goals. While most students did not indicate gaining career clarity as a motivation to enroll in the course (only 13% cited career clarity), 63% of students indicated gaining career clarity—clarity on the type of role, type of work/project, or type of organization/team—regarding their future professional goals as valuable outcome of the course at the conclusion of the semester. Specifically, 53% of students indicated gaining clarity on the type of work/project they would like to pursue, with most indicating a desire to work on social-impact driven projects in their future work.

Findings indicate that while students appear motivated to pursue PBSL experiences because of their desire to create positive impact, the sustained value they derive from PBSL experiences is primarily about design process understanding and career clarity. These results have important implications for how engineering educators present PBSL experiences to students, how they are positioned in a curriculum, and how they operate in conjunction with other efforts to promote retention and persistence in STEM.