Science in the Wild: Episode 18

Situated collaborative problem solving and technology development

Click here to listen to the interview on the UR Business Network

In this episode, Gary and Nathan continued their conversation with Bill McDonough, Director at McDonough Consulting Services. Bill has consulting experience in multiple industries including maritime, mechanical, transportation, logistics, energy and defense. He is a proven integrator across engineering, scientific and business disciplines. His work is grounded in practical application of engineering fundamentals: requirements identification and analysis, current conditions assessments, solution assessments, test and evaluation criteria and execution, and expediting design decisions.

In our conversation about developing systems over their life cycle, Bill emphasized the importance of understanding design standards with respect to the intentions that motivated them. Experience with systems in the wild reveals gaps and fills them in with more specific requirements. It also reveals misconceptions and unintended consequences, often with external systems or contexts of use not initially addressed in the standards. Test engineering brings a proactive mindset to this experience in which failures inform rather than undermine employment of a system. The tests reveal the limits for the operation of a system, they motivate design modifications, and they iteratively increase confidence in operation of the system over a wider range of conditions.

Design of test beds is an important skill, almost an art, in test engineering and failure analysis. It involves the conception and construction of mockups, prototypes and simulations that are inexpensive and safe yet capture essential elements of a system’s operation. Perhaps more importantly, they provide a tangible context of shareable experience that enables scientists and engineers to communicate as peers with stakeholders who think differently and use different terminology. The right kind of test bed helps translate esoteric measurements into everyday language and vice versa. They help manage the tradeoffs between reliability and validity.

Bill gave several examples from his own work about the design and use of test beds and failure analysis to facilitate technology development. He also emphasized how this almost always requires collaboration across disciplines. He talked about his work with the NY City Fire Department to develop a personal safety system for egress from a burning building. He also talked about his work for the U.S. Army to develop mine-resistant vehicles for soldiers. In both cases, he described the extensive conversation required with end users to understand the choices they make as thinking human beings and ways in which they adapt the use of a system to changing and unpredictable situations.

Conversations with end users, about their choices and the corresponding system use cases, help scientists and engineers understand the trade space for design of a system. The trade space reveals the relative advantages and disadvantages of alternatives that can be used for the various components of a system and what their specifications should be to support a critical range of use cases. Even rudimentary prototypes and test beds can facilitate these conversations and make them very specific without being bogged down in idiosyncratic terminology. This “situated collaborative problem solving” helps translate common words into numbers, numbers into pictures, pictures into design specifications, and design specifications into functionally improved designs.

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Key Terms and Concepts

· Design standards
· Failure analysis
· Test beds
· Operational limits or range
· Mockups, prototypes, simulations
· Reliability and validity
· Use case
· Trade space
· Situated collaborative problem solving