ME310a Tools for team formation, design process management
ìjust in timeî documentation and design capture (Cross Pads, laptops, digital cameras, hypermail)
formal document preparation, refinement, electronic archival (DRDoc templates, DropSite)
design process mapping, management (IdeaStorm, MS Project)
balanced team formation and analysis (Wilde,Ö)
methodologies for concept generation, selection, refinement (benchmarking, concept selection)
Notes:
The focus during the fall is to provide a basic set of tools for forming and managing design teams; for generating and archiving design information; and for communicating designs to an external audience.
Permail and its predecessor, hypermail, are web-based tools for automatically archiving email messages for a team. The messages can be sorted by subject, date, author, etc. For many teams, this is the single best archive of day-tp-day activity.
IdeaStorm is a commercial project-planning tool developed by a Design Division alumnus. It provides a superset of Pert and Gantt type representations.