Welcome to the
NSF Center for e-Design

The Center's mission is to serve as a national center of excellence in IT-enabled design and realization of discrete manufactured products by envisioning that information is the life blood of an enterprise and collaboration is the hallmark that seamlessly integrates design, development, testing, manufacturing, and servicing of products around the world.

The Center serves as a revolutionary integration environment with the goal to research, develop, and test technologies that enable the evolution of a collaborative service-oriented design paradigm. The Center for e-Design is extremely unique in the market, and the world, due to the specialized nature of research conducted at the Center as well as the Center’s position within the National Science Foundation’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Center model.

The manufacturing industry faces market pressures of mass customization and rapid delivery. For manufacturers of discrete products, delivering products to market quicker, cheaper and better requires design technology advancement — the key to gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage.

It is now well established that over 70% of a products’ life-cycle costs are committed at the design time, particularly the conceptual design phase. Today’s CAD systems do not accommodate conceptual design or direct imposition of multi-disciplinary preferences and constraints such as functionality, manufacturability, safety, ergonomics, or material against which such products should naturally be tested. The existing CAD systems require that a product developer possess all the design analysis tools in-house, making it impractical to employ all the needed and newest tools. While view and edit functions on a product can be accomplished at remote locations in some advanced CAD systems, there is no platform which allows a customer at a remote location to participate in the design of the product through the imposition of preferences and constraints.