The Center for Design Research (CDR) was formed as the first research center at Stanford University to study the process of what would become known as Design Thinking. [1] The Center for Design Research was founded in 1984 by a collection of faculty from Stanford's Design Division, with money from companies including Apple Computer, DARPA, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, NASA, and Toshiba Corporation. In the words of CDR founder Professor(Emeritus) Larry Leifer, "Since its inception in 1984, the work of the center has been guided by one stimulus question and two corollary response questions. What do designers do when they do design? How can we help them manage the process? How can information and communication technology support the process?" [2]
Today, CDR acts as a nexus for graduate students and researchers in a number of affiliated research labs, including those headed by Professors Mark Cutkosky, Sheri Sheppard, Monroe Kennedy, Sean Folmer and Allison Okamura. [3] Emeritus Professor Larry Leifer previously led labs in the center; Leifer was the founding Director of CDR.
The CDR is located in Building 560 at 424 Panama Mall, at the center of the "Design Quad".
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented." He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He received the Turing award in 2003.
Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie ForMemRS is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.
Hasso Plattner is a German businessman who is the co-founder of SAP SE software company. From 2003 to 2024, he served as the chairman of the company's supervisory board. As of August 2020, Forbes reported that he possessed a net worth of US$17.9 billion.
William Grant Moggridge, RDI was an English designer, author and educator who cofounded the design company IDEO and was director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. He was a pioneer in adopting a human-centred approach in design, and championed interaction design as a mainstream design discipline. Among his achievements, he designed the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass, was honoured for Lifetime Achievement from the National Design Awards, and given the Prince Philip Designers Prize. He was quoted as saying, "If there is a simple, easy principle that binds everything I have done together, it is my interest in people and their relationship to things."
Kenneth Yigael Goldberg is an American artist, writer, inventor, and researcher in the field of robotics and automation. He is professor and chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering at Berkeley, with joint appointments in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS), Art Practice, and the School of Information. Goldberg also holds an appointment in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco.
The University of Potsdam is a public university in Potsdam, capital of the state of Brandenburg, northeastern Germany.
Design thinking refers to the set of cognitive, strategic and practical procedures used by designers in the process of designing, and to the body of knowledge that has been developed about how people reason when engaging with design problems.
The Space Systems Laboratory (SSL) is part of the Aerospace Engineering Department and A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. The Space Systems Laboratory is centered on the Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility, a 50-foot-diameter (15 m), 25-foot-deep (7.6 m) neutral buoyancy pool used to simulate the microgravity environment of space. The only such facility housed at a university, Maryland's neutral buoyancy tank is used for undergraduate and graduate research at the Space Systems Lab. Research in Space Systems emphasizes space robotics, human factors, applications of artificial intelligence and the underlying fundamentals of space simulation. There are currently five robots being tested, including Ranger, a four-armed satellite servicing robot, and SCAMP, a six-degree of freedom free-flying underwater camera platform. Ranger was funded by NASA starting in 1992, and was to be a technological demonstration of orbital satellite servicing. NASA was never able to manifest it for launch and the program was defunded circa 2006. For example, Ranger development work at the SSL continues, albeit at a slower pace; Ranger was used to demonstrate robotic servicing techniques for NASA's proposed robotic Hubble Servicing Mission.
Christoph Meinel is a German computer scientist and professor of Internet technologies and systems at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) of the University of Potsdam. In the years 2004 to 2023 he was the scientific director and CEO of the HPI and has developed the openHPI learning platform with more than 1 million enrolled learners. In 2019, he was appointed to the New Internet IPv6 Hall of Fame.
The Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering gGmbH is an information technology non-profit company affiliated with the University of Potsdam in Potsdam, Brandenburg, northeastern Germany.
Daniela L. Rus is a Romanian-American computer scientist. She serves as director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of the books Computing the Future, The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, and The Mind's Mirror: Risk and Reward in the Age of AI.
John Keithan Coyle is an American short track speedskater who was part of the U.S. silver medal-winning relay team at the 1994 Winter Olympics. He is also an author, speaker and Design Thinking expert.
David M. Kelley is an American engineer, designer, businessman, and educator. He is co-founder of the design firm IDEO and a professor at Stanford University. He has received several honors for his contributions to design and design education.
The Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS) is part of the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. It replaced the existing Institute of Robotics, of the ETH Zurich in October 2002, when Prof. Bradley J. Nelson moved from the University of Minnesota, United States, to ETH Zurich, and succeeded the Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schweitzer.
The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University is a design thinking institute based at Stanford University. The school is named after SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner and was founded by David M. Kelley and Bernard Roth in 2004.
Bio-inspired robotic locomotion is a subcategory of bio-inspired design. It is about learning concepts from nature and applying them to the design of real-world engineered systems. More specifically, this field is about making robots that are inspired by biological systems, including Biomimicry. Biomimicry is copying from nature while bio-inspired design is learning from nature and making a mechanism that is simpler and more effective than the system observed in nature. Biomimicry has led to the development of a different branch of robotics called soft robotics. The biological systems have been optimized for specific tasks according to their habitat. However, they are multifunctional and are not designed for only one specific functionality. Bio-inspired robotics is about studying biological systems, and looking for the mechanisms that may solve a problem in the engineering field. The designer should then try to simplify and enhance that mechanism for the specific task of interest. Bio-inspired roboticists are usually interested in biosensors, bioactuators, or biomaterials. Most of the robots have some type of locomotion system. Thus, in this article different modes of animal locomotion and few examples of the corresponding bio-inspired robots are introduced.
John Matthew Hollerbach is a professor of computer science and research professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah. He is the editor of The International Journal of Robotics Research, a Senior Editor of Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, and a Governing Board member of the electronic journal Haptics-e.
The University Innovation Fellows Program is an international innovation fellowship program for undergraduate and graduate students based at Stanford University. The UIF program was created in 2012.
Beth Ames Altringer is an American designer and academic in user-centered design and design education. She is the director of the Master of Arts in Design Engineering program at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Altringer previously ran the Design Lab at Harvard University and taught design and innovation at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Harvard Business School.
Bruno Siciliano is an Italian engineer, academic and scientific popularizer. He is professor of Control and Robotics at the University of Naples Federico II, Chair of the Scientific Council of the ICAROS Center, and Director of the PRISMA Lab at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. He is also Honorary Professor at the university of Óbuda where he holds the Rudolf Kálmán chair.