Conference: "EXTREME Design": Examining Frontiers and Research in Extreme Design

Society faces many grand challenges, including environmental sustainability, water insecurity, climate change, and global poverty. These challenges demand system-level solutions that bring together multiple disciplines commensurate with rapid growth in the complexity of solutions and that reach beyond standard conditions and approaches. Extreme Design (XD) is an emerging field of design research that is, by its nature, focused on exceptional topics, from designing for extreme environments to designing systems of extremely high complexity. This award will support two conference workshops with interdisciplinary researchers from the US Northeast region to better define and advance academic research in this field. This award reflects NSF’s mission to advance scientific progress and address issues affecting national welfare and security. The workshops will include scholars from diverse disciplines, including engineering, design, economics, public policy, architecture, geoscience, management, psychology, physics, life sciences, and anthropology. The workshops will include panel discussions, facilitated breakout sessions, and the development of research concept papers. The workshop sessions will explore, define, and develop research opportunity spaces and related research questions for the emerging Extreme Design field. In addition to identifying compelling research questions, workshop participants will investigate and contextualize where gaps exist in current design tools, processes, and methods when addressing extreme design challenges. This workshop series will serve as a springboard for outreach on the topic of Extreme Design within and outside the engineering design and systems engineering (EDSE) communities, and will be used to stimulate further discussion and community building through follow-on academic conference sessions, journal special issues, and industry collaborations. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.