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.

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.

Design and innovation are increasingly important for attaining competitive advantage. This is achieved largely through the creation of meaningful customer experiences, and companies employing cross-functional teams are consistently reaching the best results. Designing these customer experiences requires teamwork that capitalizes on the diversity of the design team – whether gender, functional, disciplinary or cognitive. This research investigates the role of diversity in design teams, and in particular the role of cognitive diversity. It leverages David Kolb’s experiential learning theory and associated learning styles because they correlate well with the phases of the design process. It also considers factors such as gender, ethnicity, discipline, and job level.

The first study explores the composition of innovation- or design-oriented populations in academic and corporate settings. Data was gathered from undergraduate-level and graduate-level students as well as from industry professionals in design, engineering, and consulting firms worldwide. The analysis draws comparisons among the international populations, across fields of expertise, and with other demographics to build a characterization of the design population. The findings show a surprising lack of diversity where it might be most expected. In particular, converging learners consistently dominate across all populations, highlighting an alarming absence of diverging learners in the design world.

The second study explores the confidence levels in ABET skills and learning style preferences of students in project-based design courses. Results highlight national and gender differences in students’ perception of their development in ABET-related engineering and design skills. American students rated themselves higher in creativity, teamwork, ethics, facility with tools of engineering practice, and in recognizing global impact. Korean students assessed their skills higher in design, problem solving, and communication skills. However, the students follow similar gender patterns overall, where men reported more confidence in technical and analytical skills and women were more confident in communication and teamwork skills. The results also show behavioral trends that match the various learning styles. Accommodators self-rated highest in leadership and management skills, convergers self-ranked their analytical skills as strongest among all other skills, and assimilators perceive themselves as best in data processing.

The third study explores the role of diversity in design team performance and presents results about how diversity factors affect the dynamics and success of a design team. Discipline and gender are also considered. The data were gathered over two semesters of a multidisciplinary, project-based graduate level design course and captured through a series of surveys administered throughout the semester. Results offer insights into how students with different learning styles contribute differently to design team performance. The more diverse teams, as measured by the number of converging learners on the team, generally performed better than homogeneous teams, both in self-perceptions of team performance and by external reviews.

Co-Designing Sustainable Communities: The Identification and Incorporation of Social Performance Metrics in Native American Sustainable Housing and Renewable Energy System Design

By: Ryan L. Shelby

Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical Engineering

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Alice M. Agogino, Chair

Over the last quarter-century, the twin concepts of sustainability and sustainable development have emerged as a defining imperative of humanity that is situated at the nexus of science, technology, culture, economics, policy and the environment. These twin concepts are both framed as a means to mitigate the negative impacts of natural resource depletion, energy consumption, water consumption, and climate changing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated anthropogenic activities. Since the creation of the term `sustainable development' in the Brundtland Commission's Our Common Future report in 1987 until the present, there has not been a determinate meaning assigned to it. Over the last 25 years, advocates of sustainable development have been trying to assign different frameworks to the ill-defined concept first expressed in the report: that development should "meet the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

When one reviews the Brundtland Commission's report, one finds that (1) `needs' are not defined, (2) the processes for identifying these `needs' are not defined, (3) sustainability indicators or performance metrics for measuring these `needs' are not defined, and (4) there is an implicit assumption that the society of the present will have some idea and understanding of the `needs' that the society of the future will possess. These voids within Our Common Future present a great opportunity for the creation of a methodological framework that allows designers, engineers, and community members to understand the needs and the social performance metrics that local communities utilize to define sustainability and evaluate technology options for their sustainability goals.

This dissertation is a case study of a design research project with the Pinoleville Pomo Nation (PPN), a federally recognized, self-governing Native American tribe located near Ukiah, California, to determine their framework for sustainability framework, to identify their needs as it relates to their sustainability framework, and to co-design housing and renewable energy power systems to meet their needs. The design research was conducted between April 2008 and May 2011 with members from the PPN tribal government, administration, and community members living on and off the primary land base near Ukiah, California. The emphasis of this research is not about merely providing technological solutions for the PPN to adopt; nor is it about getting the PPN to return to some romanticized way of life in which indigenous people lived with no environmental impact. Instead, this research focuses on the development of the co-design methodological framework that fosters the co-production of knowledge as it relates to sustainable buildings and energy systems design and implementation by situating the concept of sustainability and sustainable development in the local context of the end user community.

The co-design methodological framework presented in this dissertation represents a discourse contribution in the areas of eliciting end user needs/metrics, situating sustainability knowledge bases, the role of citizens in the design of engineering systems, and community-based design approaches for the development of sustainable communities. This dissertation operationalizes the identification of local sustainability frameworks, the identification of needs for sustainability, the identification of social performance metrics for sustainability, and the co-design of solutions to meet local sustainability frameworks within the aforementioned discourse areas.

Information Scaffolding is a user-centered approach to information design; a method devised to aid "everyday" authors in information composition. Information Scaffolding places a premium on audience-centered documents by emphasizing the information needs and motivations of a multimedia document's intended audience. The aim of this method is to structure information in such a way that an intended audience can gain a fuller understanding of the information presented and is able to incorporate knowledge for future use. Information Scaffolding looks to strengthen the quality of a document's impact both on the individual and on the broader, ongoing disciplinary discussion, by better couching a document's contents in a manner relevant to the user.

Thus far, instructional research design has presented varying suggested guidelines for the design of multimedia instructional materials (technical animations, dynamic computer simulations, etc.), primarily do's and don'ts. The unique difference here is that Information Scaffolding is suggesting an initial methodology designed to address the information and educational needs of a document's intended audience. Information Scaffolding is an adaptation of well-established user-centered design approaches applied to information design in an attempt to provide "everyday" authors with a flexible and yet structured procedure for how to construct "everyday" documents capable of improving knowledge transfer.

The Information Scaffolding method is characterized by 3-pillars. The first is a learning primer designed to inform "everyday" authors about a few key concepts related to learning, including the number of cells in the brain and the roles of prior knowledge and attention in learning. The second is a set of methods which help "everyday" authors begin to construct audience-centered documents, tailored to a unique audience. The two key methods for audience assessment are the concept inventory and the audience demography. The third is a set of 7 design heuristics which are suggested design principles aid the author with information design. These 7 principles are: Information Metaphor, Conceptual Chunking/Information Density, Wayfinding & Navigation, Prioritization of Key Information, Temporal & Spatial Relationships, Global & Local Perspectives and finally the use of Complementary Media.

This dissertation is an introduction to and analysis of the Information Scaffolding method as applied to the design and construction of short technical animation projects. This dissertation begins with an introduction to the foundations of the Information Scaffolding method. The second portion of the dissertation is devoted to the evaluation of the Technical Animation Research Study, which uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The dissertation concludes with a revision of the Information Scaffolding method presented in light of the study's results.

How and under what circumstances does the Information Scaffolding approach aid in the construction of technical animations? The evaluation of the Information Scaffolding method is a simple author-directed, user-centered approach to improved understanding, and begins in this dissertation by looking at the technical animation process and products from three perspectives:

1. Author Scaffolding. Scaffolded Design Implementation: How do the authors implement the Information Scaffolding Framework?

2. End Users/Intended Audience - Audience Perceptions & Comprehension. What are the perceptions and the degree of comprehension of the animations by audience members?

3. Content Analysis: What characterizes the content of the finished product?

Conclusions: When scaffolded projects were authored by students without formal scaffolding training, the scaffolded projects were more memorable than the unscaffolded projects (memory being the precursory step to learning). Participants also felt that the scaffolded projects provided a more complete description of the devices.

Additionally, audience members estimated that they would need to watch scaffolded projects fewer times in order to be able to explain the assembly and operation of the described devices.

After the characterization and ranking of test bed Technical Animation projects, the major insight was that groups who had a small number of well articulated message goals ranked best in all measures, including audience perception and comprehension, project grade and content analysis.

The research study revealed opportunities for iterative improvement of the 2008 version of the Information Scaffolding methodology. The revised methodology includes: a learning primer reading requirement, a revamped set of questions for the audience demography, a document mission statement of purpose, and a more structured process for integrating the results of the concept inventory and audience assessment.

Six new considerations presented themselves as a result of this study: Project Framing, Project Storyline, Time Design, Vocabulary & Nomenclature, Misperception & Misconception, Visual Distinction. Each of these concepts is represented in the Information Scaffolding methodology in a form accessible to the "everyday" author.